Abstract
In this chapter, I give an overview of concepts that will affect and guide human activity in a warming West. Ecosystem services, introduced early on, form a unidirectional flow from the mountains to society. Water and recreational opportunities are two examples of these. I discuss limits to ecosystem services and conflicts over them. Resource management comprises the ideas and actions of those who control natural resources. Mitigation and adaptation are two human responses to a warming climate. Mitigation works globally, as in reducing atmospheric CO2. Adaptation work locally, as in using the tactics of “resistance” vs. “resilience” to reduce the negative consequences of global warming. I introduce the idea of “anti-fragile” management, which is robust to disorder or rapid change, or can even gain from them. To wrap up the book, I talk about wildness in a warming West. For example, what is the future of “pristine”, “untrammeled”, and “protected” areas? Can they survive climate change and the reshaping of ecosystems? Where in the West? For how many decades?
Everywhere is downstream.
—Taoist proverb
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Notes
- 1.
For example, many historical navies depended on extraction of timber, often as unsustainable as anything we have seen across the U.S. or elsewhere globally in the twentieth-century.
- 2.
I leave the discussion of the future of mining and livestock grazing to others, even though they are indeed major disturbances across much of the West. Climate change is unlikely to affect them directly.
- 3.
For a look at the complexity and diversity of issues around water and infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest, see work from the Climate Impacts Group, University of Washington. https://cig.uw.edu/our-work/decision-support/, the section on Planning and Infrastructure. Full disclosure: your author is affiliated with them.
- 4.
If you are interested in water in the West, in the face of society’s demands, a dated but still relevant work is M. Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986, Viking Press. The socioeconomic issues have not changed much, only their immediacy and severity, in the face of climate change.
- 5.
I have barely touched on water quality in previous chapters, for lack of space and expertise. For those interested in more coverage, one of my favorite places, a site of long-term water-quality research, is the Loch Vale Watershed in Rocky Mountain National Park. https://www2.nrel.colostate.edu/projects/lvws/research.html. See Figs. 2.7 and 8.1.
- 6.
Debris from fires? Usually not immediately as with the others, but dead trees can topple into streams, and decomposition of dead roots can undermine the stability of soils, causing rapid erosion.
- 7.
We have discussed that not all carbon in forests is stored in trees, but the tradeoffs that I will emphasize involve trees. Read on.
- 8.
The most visible being conservation in the Pacific Northwest (see discussions of the Northern Spotted Owl). Some of that, but as a colleague said once, “The timber industry didn’t run into environmentalists, it ran into the Pacific Ocean.”
- 9.
For example, many models predict the future carbon balance in forests with or without “management” (a euphemism here for repeated timber extraction). It has not gone un-noticed that the models built by those supported by the timber industry usually have different outcomes from those built by conservation groups. Can you guess which is which, whether management increases or decreases the carbon sink, from our previous discussions of the imperfect objectivity of scientific research?
- 10.
The worst smoke can be from small fires that are set by managers in order to reduce fuels on the ground. Logs, especially when they are rotten, smolder instead of truly flaming, causing much more smoke for the same amount of fuel consumed.
- 11.
What we wind up doing, as in other situations I have described, is to use models, wherein often we try to look at as general a setting as possible, in order to inform the broadest inferences possible. For example, if we look at one scenario in one watershed, and do experimental simulations in which we contrast frequent prescribed fire with no prescribed fire and look at air quality for the whole run of the experiment, one scenario may seem superior. But because of all the complexities involved, this result may not carry over into another watershed, or even a similar but not identical scenario for prescribed fire. Management is challenging.
- 12.
Although one could certainly argue that we all benefit from carbon sequestration.
- 13.
For what, or whom? And with respect to what? I’m being very general intentionally. There are many angles to this, and many stakeholders. Read on.
- 14.
I distinguish between preservation and conservation in this way. Preservation refers to a state, e.g., “pristine”, whereas conservation refers to an element or a process, e.g., the wolverine or a free-flowing stream. Other use these words in many ways. As a reader, you won’t need to hold to an exact definition here, unlike some other terms I have used.
- 15.
Of course, other types of mitigation could happen on public lands in the Western Mountains. We could shut down and replace (with carbon-neutral technology) major sources of fossil-fuel emissions, such as coal-fired power plants. But on-the-ground managers have little to say about that, and their work is our focus here.
- 16.
And even if you could, there would be conflicts with other priorities given to managers.
- 17.
Specifically, in C.I. Millar et al. 2007. Climate change and forests of the future: managing in the face of uncertainty. Ecological Applications 17:2145–2151.
- 18.
I am not aware of any proposals actually to do this—we are not there yet—but drought stress is inevitable without significant global mitigation.
- 19.
Resilience has many definitions, both for ecosystems and in the world at large. They range from the arcane philosophical to the very mathematical. A good place to start, as with many concepts, is the Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_resilience. My definition links to our existing currency: limiting factors.
- 20.
Readers who are one step ahead might ask if it works the same in energy-limited systems. What we see there will more likely be loss due to indirect effects of climate rather than direct. For example, in alpine meadows (and most other cases) energy limitations will weaken, and previously energy-limited species, i.e., trees, will invade. See “response”.
- 21.
This is a tough one because of all the other factors limiting movement for the cat, but it is an example about how resilience can be relevant for vagile organisms, not just “ecosystems”.
- 22.
Or a threshold or tipping point not so drastic.
- 23.
Led by David L. Peterson, Jessica Halofsky, and Linda Joyce.
- 24.
In management jargon, these correspond to “historical range or variability”, “future range of variability” (I’m serious), and “desired future conditions”.
- 25.
Specifically, J.E. Halofsky, et al. 2018. Climate change vulnerability and adaptation in the Northern Rocky Mountains. US Forest Service General Technical Report RMRS-GTR-374. Rocky Mountain Research Station, Ft. Collins, Colorado. Free online at https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/publications/titles/rmrs_gtr.html (scroll down a bit). Long, but quite readable if you don’t try to do it in one session.
- 26.
Who is in charge of which public lands in the Western Mountains may seem needlessly opaque. National Parks are part of the Department of the Interior, which also runs the US Fish and Wildlife Service (creatures) and the Bureau of Land Management (non-forested lands, sometimes called “rangelands”, reflecting a bias toward certain “services”). The Forest Service is in the Department of Agriculture (really!), and manages wilderness areas, forested or above treeline, that are not in national parks. The Forest Service is charged with adaptation on most forested landscapes within the domain, although work such as that cited in Note 25 brings in participants from different agencies, along with many other stakeholders.
- 27.
Quiz: how many of these apply to all the Western Mountains, and how many are limited to some or just the Northern Rocky Mountains?
- 28.
See the reference in Note 25 for examples.
- 29.
Specifically, with the inputs from different stakeholders reported in the reference in Note 25.
- 30.
This could be literally the equivalent of a mistake in algebra, where we relied, for example, on a computer program with a bug. Surprisingly often, however, it could be false precision, where we thought we could calculate a more detailed answer than was warranted. Recall our example (Chapter 4) of predicting the high temperature in one location on April 15, 2040.
- 31.
There are 36 different ways (6 for the first die ∗ 6 for the second) that two dice can display when rolled, so the chance of snake eyes (1,1) is 1 in 36. But if (“ecological”) dice are being rolled a lot, say 1000 times a day, then about 28 times per day, on average, that very unlikely event will occur. Given the number of annual, or decadal, events in the Western Mountains, even a one-in-a-thousand outcome will happen occasionally.
- 32.
James Hansen aptly compares changing temperature extremes in a warming climate to loaded dice. What if your dice were engineered so that it was almost impossible to roll a 6, and pretty hard to roll a 5? You will see a lot more snake eyes (hot weather). If we are running stochastic models, one way to evaluate them is whether or not the frequency of anomalies matches that in the real world. This is just as important as getting the averages right.
- 33.
Recall that I said in Chapter 7 that animal population models abound. Population viability analysis (PVA) uses these models and other tools to predict whether local or global species will survive, and for how long.
- 34.
But the alert reader will notice that I am ignoring other “surprises”. Perhaps the hotter weather will make for an unexpectedly severe fire, or bark beetles may reproduce more rapidly than expected because of the warmer weather. Even so, will the consequences be as great as a transition to non-forest?
- 35.
Recall our whitebark pine example, where we want to make populations of the species resilient to (at least) three types of stress: (1) blister rust, (2) encroachment by other species, and (3) more intense fire. Each of these suggests difference actions to produce resilience. (1) Finding genetic stock that is resistant, (2) using prescribed fire to maintain open stands, (3) but restricting condition under which prescribed fires are started or wildfires allowed to burn. With rates of change that were more “forgiving”, there might be more time to implement all three methods strategically.
- 36.
In a book. N.N. Taleb, 2012. Anti-fragile: Things that gain from Disorder. Random House, NY. Hence the title of this section. Taleb is probably best known for claiming, with mathematical justification, that extreme events, sometimes called “black swans”, are inherently unpredictable. This may seem like a dead end for management, but what if we could make the proverbial lemonade out of lemons by anticipating them? Read on.
- 37.
Which is often limited by finite resources and by being a (undeservedly) low priority. See Chapter 8.
- 38.
Of necessity, we are getting away from trying to keep things the same, or within the range of past variability, but that paradigm is hard to give up, especially for those of us for whom the historical state of the Western Mountains has been such a force in our lives. See next (and last!) section.
- 39.
Not all US wilderness areas or endangered species are in the West (especially if you exclude Alaska from the “West”). Of the 803 designated wilderness areas in the US, the five largest, and 14 of the 20 larger than 1,000,000 acres, are in Alaska. But only one over 1,000,000 acres is outside the West or Alaska, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota (19th largest). Unsurprisingly, Hawaii is the state with the most endangered species (503), followed by California (299), Florida (135), Alabama (122), and Texas (103). In general, the farther south the state, the more endangered species it has. Endangered fish (79 species) outnumber mammals (37 species) and other animal life forms (birds, reptiles, insects).
- 40.
The first issue of the journal Conservation Biology was in 1980. Topics addressed in its early years included population viability, landscape fragmentation, keystone species, problems with inbreeding, and the effects of human activities such as clearcut logging on all the above.
- 41.
Wild Earth ran from 1990–2004. Its publishers had left the Earth First! movement, unhappy with that group’s direction.
- 42.
And I confess beyond anything but a passing interest. The light-to-heat ratio of much of the discussion does not seem particularly favorable. But don’t take my word for it. A strong counter-argument to the idea of wilderness comes from William Cronon, at https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html, or in more detail in his books. The “pro” is best experienced live, in my view, by getting “out there”.
- 43.
How far is far? Remote medical providers are taught that if you are an hour or more from “definitive medical care”, you are in a “remote” setting and can provide medical services that are outside your purview in other settings. For example, you can attempt to reduce (basically straighten) a major leg fracture, to save a limb from loss of circulation. But if you are miles from the nearest road, but have cell service and can call a helicopter to evacuate a patient, that’s not “remote”. Likewise, how remote does it feel to be on a 14,000 ft. summit when fellow summiteers are chatting away on their cellphones?
- 44.
More specifically, you can make mistakes that might not get you into trouble in the city, or even on the farm, but will do so in the wild. “Your safety is not guaranteed.”
- 45.
Recall our discussions of variability and of fire regimes that are flammability-limited vs. fuel-limited.
- 46.
A legitimate argument against this is that current prescribed fires produce a lot of smoke because of their type of combustion (smoldering), due to the fuels’ being largely dead wood, often large pieces that burn “dirty”. Native Americans burned mostly live vegetation, having different (a wider range of) objectives from present-day fire managers. We will never know for sure, but the idea of crystal-clear air across the West before Euro-American conquest is a myth.
- 47.
Assuming that we don’t “choose” to mitigate future warming! As I write, the chances of doing that, even not nearly enough, seem slim.
- 48.
Thankfully, I have experienced this personally only on the first two.
- 49.
See https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/destinations/north-america/united-states/national-parks/avoid-overtourism-indiana-dunes-gateway-arch/ and sources therein. The good news for remoteness advocates is that in the big-name parks, such as Yosemite and Yellowstone, visitors tend to cluster around the tourist attractions rather than fanning out into more remote areas. As our population continues to grow older on average, we are unlikely to see a big increase in backcountry travel soon.
- 50.
As a conscious backlash to all this, Dave Foreman, the founder of Earth First!, proposed the creation of “super” wild areas. Therein there would be no communications except in person, and no rescues. (“Don’t leave notice of where you’re going with anyone”). This idea never went anywhere publicly, except that some intrepid individuals practice it for themselves and their companions, i.e., intentionally eschewing any outside support.
- 51.
For example, in 2012 expedition leaders at Mt. Everest canceled ascents that were already underway, citing the worst instability in ice and rock formations that they had seen. (Sorry clients, no refunds).
- 52.
Because these are flammability-limited fire regimes, where we expect wildfire extent and severity to increase. See Chapter 6.
- 53.
Not helped by regulations that promote reckless behavior. Perhaps it is the delusion that “guns make people safer”, but the recent decision to make it legal to carry guns in US national parks will surely increase danger levels, and make “wildness” more like “wild West”.
- 54.
One day in the late 1960s I was hiking the Mt. Whitney trail and was approached by a field ranger who asked to see my wilderness permit. I had never heard of such a thing, and of course didn’t have one, but it would have been a formality back then. Over the years, the supply/demand ratio has shrunk so that as many readers must know, when popular campground sites open for a particular day, it takes 10–15 s for internet requests for them to take all the vacancies. This is also starting to happen for popular trailheads.
- 55.
Walking a few years ago in Banff National Park, BC, Canada, my wife and I encountered a warning sign: “Caution, sow with cubs seen here” (meaning: Protective and potentially aggressive mother grizzly bear is nearby. She could outrun you and kill you with one swipe of the paw). We decided not to hike in grizzly-bear habitat any more. Fear and respect both, and definitely a sense of wildness.
- 56.
See D.F. Doak and K. Cutler. 2013. Re-evaluating evidence for past population trends and predicted dynamics of Yellowstone grizzly bears. Conservation Letters doi: 10.1111/conl.12048. Free online (as I write) at https://doaklab.org/.
- 57.
There is (was!) a famous section high up on Mt. Everest on the route by which Tenzing and Hillary made the first ascent in 1953. This was a steep 40-ft. pitch called the “Hillary Step”, mostly rock but (evidently) secured to the mountain partly by ice. It was most likely shaken loose by the 2015 earthquake, but very possibly destabilized before that by loss of ice.
- 58.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonders_of_the_World for an overview.
- 59.
Seasoned floaters on the main river consider that the many steep side canyons have most of the wildness in the Grand Canyon.
- 60.
As with other developed areas, Yosemite Valley will see major efforts to suppress wildfires and reduce their severity with prescribed fires. This should help for a while.
- 61.
But less and less every year. In 2018, they covered about 6% of Earth’s land area, down from 14% formerly. Almost all of the loss is from clearing by humans.
- 62.
This happened between 2003–2006, and although some toxins were produced that killed animals (bison), geologists tell us that there is no immediate threat of a volcanic eruption. Here is a reminder, though, that not all geological processes require geological time scales.
- 63.
- 64.
For example, the Picket (sub)Range, east of Mt. Baker and perhaps the most rugged area of the Cascade Range, with 21 peaks over 7500 ft.
- 65.
Literally, these are clumps of trees, sometimes clonal (multiple trees from the same root stock). In islands, trees protect each other a bit from the elements, so there is survival in numbers at the extremes of their ranges.
- 66.
Including an empty path, i.e., not changing anything you do in the world. I am not necessarily advocating any of these paths, nor calling out anyone for not taking them. I will, however, register my disapproval for those who actively obstruct one or more of them.
- 67.
And eventually even reverse it, but as I have said, there is already a warming “debt”, thanks to the long life of CO2 in the atmosphere.
- 68.
Or before, particularly with topics for which even detection conflicts too much with prejudices.
- 69.
For example, as I write only one person has climbed El Capitan, Yosemite’s 3000-ft. high granite monolith, unroped and alone, about 5000 people have “through-hiked” the 2650-mile Pacific Crest Trail (but fewer than 100 more than once), millions have visited Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, and billions can view their scenery on the internet.
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McKenzie, D. (2020). Mountains and People in a Warming World. In: Mountains in the Greenhouse. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42432-9_9
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