The Forest for the Lakes

      Escaping the heat seems to be the goal for much of the world, the drought in many areas only adding fuel to the fire, so to speak.  The combustion created adds more heat while also adding small particles into the air, making a hot situation even hotter.  Homes and wild animals are lost as forests and brush fall victim to conditions we humans seems to have helped create...sigh.  So with that bit of reality, my wife and I "escaped" and headed to the Lakes.  Okay, they're not really called that but to be fortunate enough to view three lakes within a short distance is rather enough to gain such a moniker in our minds.  And besides, the temperatures at this higher elevation were some 20F degrees lower than at our house (our area had already tied the record for most days over 100F degrees in one summer).  But besides the beauty of hiking through an area still spared from fires and and from infestations of pine beetles, I was struck by the reaction of our visiting friend, someone who usually comes out only in winter to take advantage of the skiing.  To him, the area he knew almost by heart, looked so different without snow (his reference to where he was hiking being only the series of chair lifts).  It was the opposite for my wife and I, staring blankly at a ski map of the snow-covered mountains and equally disoriented since we don't ski.  It was a prime example of two entirely different viewpoints, both correct and both displaying what probably envelops a large swath of the population.  People can stare at the same thing or issue or person and yet emerge with two different yet perhaps correct, views.  All that aside, one thing was certain and that was that it was hot.

      No worries, this isn't a big lecture on global warming (okay, it's a little bit of that), but rather on how some "worlds" around us are changing before our eyes, even as we ourselves age.  Take seaweed.  An article in Hakai wrote: From Australia to the Arctic, kelp forests are disappearing as the ocean heats up.  But in some places, such as in the chilly waters off England’s southwest coast, the struggling kelp ecosystem isn’t collapsing entirely.  Instead, it’s being replaced.  Over the past 80 years, once-abundant forests of the local cold-water kelp Laminaria hyperborea have slowly been overtaken by its warm-water cousin L. ochroleuca.  No big deal?  But for marine ecologist David Smale, it IS a big deal: In laboratory work examining kelp collected from their study sites, Smale and his colleagues showed how the replacement of one kelp with another leads to a huge difference in the biodiversity of the ecosystem.  The cold-water kelp, they found, can support upward of 50 grams of red algae each.  The warm-water kelp, in contrast, had almost none.  This difference translated up the food chain.  The cold-water kelp supported up to 375 invertebrates each, while a similarly sized warm-water kelp maxed out at 25...Because these invertebrates are food for fish and other species, the potential consequences are sweeping.

     Much the same is happening with coral. Said a review in the New York Review of Books: A scientific study published this year indicates that once global heating reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius, almost no corals will avoid severe bleaching, which leaves them vulnerable to disease and starvation.  If current trends continue, we’ll hit that temperature mark in the early 2030s.  Just 0.2 percent of reefs will escape bleaching—an outcome that researchers say will be catastrophic...The decline of coral reefs is accelerating so quickly that we may live to see the end of them.  National Geographic took this issue head on when it explored the reefs around the Philippines.  Explosive destruction of reefs by impoverished fishermen have led politicians to create marine sanctuaries; one such politician was the newly elected mayor of Dauin, a small municipality in the chain.  His banning of certain areas of the reef area led to death threats and lawsuits but he stuck with his decision.  Said part of the article: “What made you so passionate?” I ask. “You’re not even from a fishing family.” “I am a mining engineer,” he replies.  “I worked for mining companies for 12 years before entering politics.  We destroyed mountains.  We used toxic chemicals that flowed out to sea.  I am an experienced destroyer of the environment.  I am licensed to destroy.  What I experienced is that once you destroy the environment, no human being can put that right again.  It cannot be put back for your children.  And when you kill the last fish, you will realize you can’t eat money.”

     Perhaps most surprising to me was the situation in Russia...it's warming up 2.5 times faster than the rest of the world.  It has the world's largest forests (a fifth of the world's trees); it makes more money from agriculture than it does from selling weapons; it has the world's largest oil and gas reserves (in the mid-1980s, it was the world's largest oil producer)...but global warming is taking its toll.  Said an article in NY Books: About two thirds of Russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round.  As permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break.  Anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds.  Sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings.  Ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods.  The Arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water.*  In California it's not much better.  National Wildlife Federation's magazine wrote this: "Extreme heat is more deadly for humans than any other type of natural disaster," says NWF Chief Scientist Bruce Stein.  Wildlife do not fare much better...That was the case last summer for endangered salmon in California's Sacramento River, where the heatwave raised water temperatures high enough to cook nearly all of the river's Chinook juveniles; only an estimated 2.6 percent of the population survived.

     Okay, you say, you get it...it's hot, no matter who or what caused it.  We can agree to disagree, as they say.  But it's not exactly the main priority for two of the populations leaving their homes because of war.  Two lengthy pieces gave glimpses of what many of us would face in similar situations, entering a place where you didn't know the language and came with little other than what you could carry or wear.  Where to go, who to trust, how to find a job or place to stay.  In Poland, said a piece in the London Review of Books, some Ukrainian refugees are being lured by sex traffickers in other countries or unknowingly forced into servitude.  Said part of the piece: The Ukrainian women arriving in Poland find a country experiencing a different kind of conflict.  The Polish government recently tightened what was already a near total ban on abortion, and both emergency and basic contraception are tricky to access.  Many women arrive in need of medical care for problems ranging from those caused by sexual violence (STDs, pregnancy, trauma) to infections, injuries and already existing illnesses.  Proper medical care also enables evidence to be gathered about the prevalence of rape and sexual assault more generally in Ukraine.  When arriving in Poland many refugees are met at train stations and border crossings by religious groups and belligerent anti-choice activists, who see their plight as constituting a new front in Poland’s long-running battle over faith and reproductive freedom.  Across Poland, local councils, mayors and central government, with different political agendas, are vying for control of the humanitarian response.  There are huge disparities in the treatment of refugees.  This is part of the reason that, as of Easter weekend, for the first time the number of Ukrainians crossing back into the country outnumbered those leaving.  

      The same magazine had this to say about the current situation in Afghanistan: In Kandahar, women in faded burqas sit by the side of the road and jump to their feet whenever they see a pickup truck go by carrying Taliban.  The women run after the trucks, hoping they’re distributing food aid.  Men, too, queue up for Taliban charity, most of them former sharecroppers driven from their lands by drought and war.  In Kandahar’s main hospital, a doctor told me that the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition has more than doubled over the past year.  ‘We feed them, they get slightly better, their mothers take them back to their villages and a couple of weeks later they are back.’   He said the mothers are given food packs for their children, but it’s never enough, because they have no choice but to share the rations among all their children, sick and healthy.  Three and sometimes four children occupy each hospital bed, tiny skeletons with exposed ribs and inflated stomachs.  There is little difference in size between five-year-olds from Panjwayi district outside Kandahar and two-year-olds from Helmand.  The numbers are horrific:  Unicef estimates that two million Afghan children require treatment for acute malnutrition.  In a country where 97 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, this is a crisis that is not going to be easily resolved.

      Okay stop; even I get it.  The world is out of whack and for a lot of us we need to take notice of what is happening, even if we feel that what we do might not make any difference.  National Geographic recently devoted an entire issue to saving forests, something I pondered as I hiked through strands of trees.  One piece was simply titled "Forests are reeling from climate change -- but the future isn't lost."  Then came this in the recent issue of NY Books: Saving forests in what must be done -- though clearly not the only thing.  According to the IPCC, (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) forest loss needs to stop completely by 2030 in order to keep warming within 1.5 degrees Celcius by the end of the century.  

      Of course, none of this matters if the forest is on fire.  The New Yorker gave a glimpse of what that would be like, not running to evacuate from a forest fire but being one of the first responders to be dropped smack into the heart of the flames: West (Mike West, part of the Lassen Interagency Hotshot Crew whose job is to contain a wildfire) glanced up and saw a churning mass in the sky.  Squad leaders ordered the firefighters to assemble their gear.  To West, time seemed to stretch.  “I was standing in line just thinking, Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” he said.  By the time the hotshots started to hike out of the hole, the fire was boiling up toward them from the canyon floor.  They moved as fast as they could, crawling over boulders and pulling one another up rock faces.  Chainsaws were passed back and forth as crew members grew tired of carrying them.  West struggled to breathe.  As people began to fall behind, his squad leader yelled, “Just go, just go. Pass ’em!”  The sound of a running crown fire is sometimes compared to the roar of a freight train or the thunder of heavy ocean surf.  It reminded West of a waterfall, or an ongoing explosion.  Between the crews and the fire lay a stretch of unburned fuels which wildland firefighters call “the green.”  “The fear is that you have this active, loud, roaring fire, and you’re in the green, and you have nowhere to go, and it’s just, is this going to get me?” West said.  The crown fire raced uphill, torching the trees to their right.  They watched as the flames reached the ridge in front of them, then flicked over the edge and stopped.  It took the group of around forty hotshots half an hour to get out of the hole; at the top, West threw up. 

      Call it what you will, global warming or climate change (or global change), said NASA, but something is happening.  Even if you are agreeing or disagreeing with the recent Supreme Court decision on a rule that never went into effect, or if you feel that this is just how the Earth naturally works over the centuries and eons, we are in it now.  And who's to say that any of us have seen things from all perspectives?  From the comfort of a lake or an air-conditioned home, it's difficult to accept that things are really that bad elsewhere, even if we know that they are.  That same forest piece in NY Books started with the Sámi concept of sufficiency, that... "You only take what is necessary from nature, never a surplus.  It is the exact opposite of the modern idea of sustainability, which is based on the maximum surplus that can be extracted without destroying nature’s capacity to sustain the resource.  The piece then went on: To leave an abundance beyond your need, that is the principle, one that has no footing in modern society...Climate binds us all together. Life binds us all together.  “I thought I was paying attention, (wrote author Ben Rawlence in his book, The Treeline), but a whole different level of noticing is required.”...You feel the layering of his heightened noticing throughout the book -- his ability to turn over a topographical or biological detail and find on its underside a rune that changes everything.  In a sense, he’s emulating the heightened sensitivity of many woodland creatures -- reindeer that can see ultraviolet light, wood ants that can taste the differences between tree resins, birds that prefer the resonance of the wood of old-growth trees.  And there’s a moral to that sentence --“a whole different level of noticing is required”-- that captures the strangeness of the changes happening all around us.  As things begin to come apart, we see more clearly the connections that bound them together.

      Author Justin Gregg, in talking to Book Page about his new book If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal, said: Looking at everything happening in the world today -- the conflict in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war, or the climate emergency, or the deepening political division in many Western democracies-- I am honestly concerned about the future of our species.  Plenty of pundits are predicting with alarming certainty that the human species is teetering on the brink of extinction -- not because of any external forces, such as comets or plagues, but because we are extincting ourselves through carbon emissions and advanced forms of holocaust-inducing warfare.  Through things that are, in other words, products of our complex way of thinking.  This is precisely  why I am asking people to reevaluate the goodness of human intelligence and consider that dung beetles and chickens might be in fact be better designed for life on this planet than we are.  

     The James Webb telescope is sending back images which are stunning; and what looks like cosmic gibberish to most of us, is actually..."the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high."  The NASA project shares that all of this comes about because of ..."a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency)."   How refreshing is that?  In an age when we continue to bicker about the heat or the climate or the inaction of Congress, NASA reminds us that cooperation still exists, pretty much like the forests do.  My wife and I were fortunate enough to escape from the heat by hiking to one of the mountain lakes nearby.  But we could have just as easily looked up each night and seen a sunset, or a sunrise.  What we learned from our friend's perspective was that we had a rare chance to view things differently, to look at the wildflowers and the forests for all that was there, and perhaps where we fit in on this planet we call home.  NASA had an even better idea on this thought, a biref lesson of why we might want to consider cooperating more with others...other people, other species, and perhaps other worlds.  Their video was simply titled: 209 Seconds That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence.     

*See if this sounds at all familiar..."we are leading the race to turn #### from a country over-reliant on import of oil and gas to a country that might one day become a net exporter of clean energy."  It comes from someone richer than Bill Gates, and a key figure in India, Gautam Adani (he recently purchased Israel's Haifa shipping port).  Only if you thought that it was hot here in Russia and the U.S., be thankful you're not facing what India is facing where temps recently topped 120F.  Said a piece in LRB: In May 2022 temperatures in Northern India hit 49°C.  The Indian Meteorological Department declared it a ‘heat wave’ and in a heat wave, public infrastructure begins to fail: pavements buckle, railway tracks warp, and electrical grids are strained by increased use of air conditioning.  Fires start in dry fields.  Industrial plants require more water for their cooling systems, straining already reduced supplies.  Crops are ravaged.  A heat wave is also a national health emergency.  At a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C  --that is, the equivalent of 35°C and 100 per cent humidity-- the human body can no longer cool itself by sweating.  You overheat and die within hours.  Throughout May, regions across India saw consistent wet-bulb temperatures between 25 and 33°C.