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Show A-22 The Park Record Wed/Thurs/Fri, July 4-6, 2018 Climate change is making it harder to revive ecosystems CoRe samples Ecologists are increasingly focused on future I didn’t recognize it as a naked Emperor until it had waddled up to the front of the chanting mob to explain why a recent flare-up with bone spurs would once again preclude any taking up of pitchfork and torch to lead them into the fray. But, I digress. The road I intended to roam would have come up through Charleston before Deer Creek, Keetley before Jordanelle, the Outlaw Trail prior to Hole in the Wall, and the Alamo Saloon just ahead of Darlene taming the joint. Oh, those were the days. It didn’t get much better than free-pouring Red-Eye from the brown bag you rode in on. For some reason, it has become my nature to reach back beyond memory to that place where making it up as you go is the only way out. What I do recall, however, is the trail that led up through town to Park City’s legendary Fourth of July goings-on. I wore that down to bedrock. Then there were the Idaho-panhandle mining-camp coming-of-age days of my youth. One particular 4th of July parade stands out like no other. With rabid anti-communism at its peak, I spent the entire parade route with rifle on shoulder marching in a small circle in front of a Stalin-looking character in the back of a 2 1/2 ton flatbed truck. The rear of the vehicle had been bisected into halves demonstrating the boot heel of totalitarianism (me) versus the freedom of democracy (a slightly older friend lounging by a fishing hole with rod in hand and sporting a straw hat). I always sensed a bit of corruption in the assigning of roles. I never did like that guy much. But back to my days celebrating freedom in Park City. My first stop, once the rugby pitch adopted its current north-south orientation, was this smallish tree near its northeast corner. There, under boughs seemingly bred for just such purpose, a beer cooler and low-rider beach MAYA L. KAPOOR High Country News Carianne Campbell remembers the exact moment she fell in love with the Sonoran Desert. As a botany major in college, she joined a class field trip to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the southern border of Arizona, arriving and setting up camp in the dark. Emerging from her tent the next morning, Campbell, who grew up on the East Coast, caught her first glimpse of enormous saguaros, clustered organ pipes and bright desert wildflowers. She knew immediately that she wanted to work in this kind of landscape. Today, Campbell is the restoration director for Sky Island Alliance, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Tucson, Arizona. She leads efforts to re-establish native plant communities in “sky islands” — isolated, ecologically rich mountain ranges that dot southeastern Arizona and New Mexico and northern Sonora, Mexico, and serve as home to some 7,000 species of plants and animals. Under Campbell’s guidance, Sky Island Alliance restores riparian habitat that’s been overrun by invasive species, such as fountaingrass, which crowds out local species and transforms the desert into fire-prone grassland. The point of Campbell’s job used to be relatively straightforward: She attempted to conserve local biodiversity by re-establishing the wild spaces where native plant and animal species once lived. But given the planet’s rapid climate shifts, the connections between wild organisms and their ecosystems are fraying, forcing restoration biologists, including Campbell, to rethink the purpose of their work. It no longer helps to remember what a site looked like 20 years ago. “We need to be thinking about what it’s going to be like 20 years into the future,” she said. In the early 1980s, ecological restoration was much like cleaning up after a rowdy house party: trying to return a degraded habitat to its former pristine condition. Project managers focused on returning the right numbers and species of plants — and by extension, animals — to places that had been logged, mined, invaded by nonnative species or otherwise altered by people. “I’ve always been taught that restoration is about taking a degraded site and restoring it back to what it was before the disturbance,” Campbell said. But increasingly, scientists who study ecosystems, as well as land managers who do restoration work, are questioning that model of ecological restoration, which relies on the idea of a stable “climax community,” even though many ecosystems are always changing. The West’s forests, for one, are much more dynamic than many people realize. Notwithstanding individual tree outliers, such as millennia-old redwoods and bristlecone pines, most North American forest ecosystems are, at most, 400 or 500 years old, according to Don Falk, a forest ecologist at the University of Arizona. Reasons vary, from a severe drought in the late 1500s, to 1800s tree harvesting by Euro-Americans. Today, forests continue to undergo constant change. “Many of the forests we look at are in post-fire recovery, we just don’t see it,” Falk said. Outbreaks of insects such as bark beetles, which can decimate forests, add to the constant change. “We want to think of the primeval old-growth forest as having this stable characteristic, until we come along and introduce disturbance … but the idea of forests in equilibrium is probably wrong.” Indeed, events ranging from volcanic eruptions to the Pleistocene ice age have left their mark on the West’s forests. But with climate change, landscape-level transformations are happening faster and becoming more extreme. As the West becomes warmer and drier, the idea of “recovery” becomes increasingly unrealistic. Instead, ecosystems transform, such as in northern New Mexico, where Gambel oaks may replace pine forest after a fire. “This is really a vexing problem for the field of restoration ecology, because our first instinct — and it’s not wrong — is always to want to put it back to the way it was before we screwed things up,” Falk said. Restoration ecologists, in other words, no longer know how to define success. “The dilemma for the field of restoration is, it’s almost damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Falk said. “If you try to go back to 1850, it’s just going to be a nonstarter, because the climate has moved on, and lots of other things have moved on. But if you’re not restoring to a reference condition, then are you just sort of playing God and inventing new landscapes?” This identity crisis is global: This year, at conferences from Iceland to Washington state, the Society for Ecological Restoration is grappling with the question of restoration during climate change. Instead of trying to re-establish a checklist of plants and animals, as they might have in the past, some restoration practitioners are now focusing on ecosystem functions. For Campbell, that means worrying about pollinators, including birds, bats and insects, in the sky islands. Across the West, spring is thawing earlier and broiling into summer faster, and the region is getting hotter and drier overall, creating a mismatch between periods when pollinators need flowers and the This is really a vexing problem for the field of restoration ecology, because our first instinct — and it’s not wrong — is always to want to put it back to the way it was before we screwed things up,” Don Falk forest ecologist at the University of Arizona times and places where those flowers are available. “How can I use various plant species in ways to ease that?” Campbell said. Campbell keeps climate change and pollinators in mind when she’s selecting native vegetation to plant. A low-elevation site might have red, tubular flowers in the spring, for example, and then again in September, but none during the hottest summer months. “I could plug in a species like desert honeysuckle, which would be blooming in that interim time, and providing a more constant source of nectar,” she said. Research on the timing of flowers and pollinator arrivals supports Campbell’s concerns, although scientists don’t yet know the consequences of these mismatches. Nicole Rafferty, a University of California, Riverside ecologist, studied the flowering schedule of manzanita, a mountain shrub with wine-red stems and glossy leaves, in the sky islands. The timing of the winter rains determines the appearance of manzanita blossoms, which are among the first mountain flowers each spring. But with winter rains arriving later, manzanitas are not flowering in time to feed the earliest native bees. Those later-flowering manzanitas also end up growing less fruit, which mule deer, black bears and other animals eat. Most plants have a wide enough variety of pollinators so that they won’t disappear entirely, Rafferty said, but the fate of those pollinators is harder to predict. Overall, Campbell’s goal is still to conserve as much biodiversity as possible in the sky islands, where each mountain range has its own unique combination of plants and animals. But she knows she can’t simply reassemble historic plant communities. “Certainly now, we (take) a forward view,” Campbell said. “How is this (species) going to be durable into an uncertain future, where there’s going to be larger, more intense wildfires, and more erosion, flooding, drought, all of those things?” She’s had to adapt how she uses native species, because of the changing rainfall patterns. For many years, Sky Island Alliance planted native vegetation in the spring, following the winter rains. But two years ago, Campbell noticed that most of the plants died. With spring arriving earlier and becoming hotter, “there’s not enough time for those new plants to become established, and then be able to go dormant to make it through to monsoon season, and become good members of their vegetation society,” Campbell said. She has stopped spring planting altogether at restoration sites, waiting instead until after the summer monsoon rains. The new focus of ecological restoration is “less about identifying the particular species, and more about the traits,” Elise Gornish, a cooperative extension specialist at the University of Arizona, said. Gornish surveyed almost 200 California managers, including master gardeners, ranchers, nonprofits, federal employees and others, about nonnative species. Close to half of her respondents, including most of the federal employees she interviewed, already used nonnative plants in restoration projects, often for erosion control. One reason was that they were less expensive. But almost 40 percent of the managers also contemplated using nonnatives because of climate change. “It’s clear that folks are really, really concerned about climate change and restoration,” she said. “A lot of folks wouldn’t use the term ‘climate change’ to describe their challenges; they would say things like ‘drought,’ ‘changing environmental conditions.’ ” But the bottom line is the same: “Practices people have been using historically, and probably pretty successfully, and things that are now policies among the federal agencies … are not successful anymore,” she said. Some plant populations, for example, are responding to climate change by moving up in elevation and in latitude. “What this suggests is that if you’re in your site that needs restoration, the plants from that area are probably no longer well-adapted to the new conditions of that area,” Gornish said. This raises prickly questions about whether or not to start using plants from farther south and lower elevations, or even from entirely different regions. “People get extremely nervous, and with good reason, when you start talking about moving plants around,” Gornish said. The U.S. has not had a good track record with introduced species. “Some of our most noxious invasives, like tamarisk or buffelgrass, are things we planted 80 years ago,” she said. Not that long ago, the inclusion of nonnative plants species in restoration projects “was heretical,” Falk agreed. Now, however, those species may be the best-adapted flora for a region’s changing climate. But for Falk, managing for functions more than for species is still ecological restoration. It’s always been true that, ultimately, “you’re trying to maintain the ability of a system to adapt,” he said. For her part, Campbell is learning to reconsider the role of exotic species on the landscape. For example, she sometimes spares bird-of-paradise, an evergreen shrub in the pea family that is native to Uruguay and Argentina, in her restoration planning. A fast-growing ornamental with feathery leaves and bright red and orange flowers, bird-of-paradise thrives in the Southwest’s disturbed landscapes, where it can crowd out native species. But removing the plant now may actually rob hummingbirds and other pollinators of meals. “It flowers opportunistically with rain,” Campbell said, “so in summer months, it can be the only flowers available.” This story was originally published at High Country News (hcn.org) on June 29. By Jay Meehan Independence daze chair could seek refuge from the midday sun until their reasons for being became manifest later in the day. And that would take place once the tribe returned from interacting with the then much smaller parade up on Main Street and the cooler was ceremoniously breached. From then on, the sole gurgling within earshot would come not only from the babbling brook known as Poison Creek, but also from the emptying of aluminum cans. There wasn’t a lot of manicuring going on in town in those These days, however, moseying up the parade backstage of Swede Alley prior to the fighter jet flyover and siren wail that kick things off, startles the senses. Serving as a reminder of both the growth of this community and the rituals it demands, one arrives face-toface with change.” days. Weeds and grasses were pretty much given free reign. If an “edger” or “weed whacker” had stumbled into the old burg, it might have been mistaken for the drive train to some abandoned Willys Jeep. Depending on the year, my quiver may have well included the prototype Louisville Slugger that I never left home without following the post parade cultural brouhaha of 1971. Never did research its DNA to discover if it were maple or ash, but it felt smooth to the grip and never turned up missing from its perch next to the cue-rack at the Alamo. There was this most-pleasing gauntlet you got to run in those days as you made your way up Main Street to your favored parade-viewing locale. Exchanging top-shelf trash talk with Art Durante, the maestro himself, out front of his Main Street Hardware emporium became a favorite rite-of-passage. Closing down your business for the holiday wasn’t always the consensus economic option back then. Often you could find quality banter available with Barry the Lapidary or at any of the custom leather or jewelry shops along the street. And it goes without saying that your favorite watering hole was open for counseling. Early on, the non-threatening and friendly confines of the Alamo Saloon became the tribe’s go-to hangout. Easily the most literature friendly along the libation-distribution circuit, it drew a wide variety of ex-pat communities that had arrived in town to have their way with whatever slope-style amenities they could conjure. These days, however, moseying up the parade backstage of Swede Alley prior to the fighter jet flyover and siren wail that kick things off, startles the senses. Serving as a reminder of both the growth of this community and the rituals it demands, one arrives face-to-face with change. If that weren’t enough, we now have the current political climate to deal with. A perception of expanding fascism has some of us taking a knee. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see the riotous post-parade antics of 1971 once again raising its head. Not that cooler heads won’t prevail. Speaking of which, I believe there’s a cooler down on the rugby pitch that requires attention. Happy Independence Day! Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years. Red CaRd RobeRts By Amy Roberts Divided we stand This week, American flags are flapping in the wind on porch fronts across the country. Sparklers have been purchased, there’s extra beer in the fridge and grills are ready to go. All standard preparations to celebrate the 4th of July. This year, though, it feels a little less celebratory. Sure, neighbors will still gather; parades and concerts and fireworks shows will still go off. There will still be a hot dog eating contest somewhere, the volume will be turned up a tad louder for the Star Spangled Banner. It will all still happen, but perhaps this year it’s more out of habit and nostalgia than true celebration of our nation’s independence. The whole thing feels a bit like opening Christmas presents with your family by court order. We’re a divided country, to say the least. And yes, we’ve been divided before, even more than we are now. The Civil War, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement — we were not exactly all in agreement during those periods of history. But it feels divided now, to be sure. Partly that’s because there is no way to avoid the partisanship. We have 24/7 access to people screaming at each other on a cable news channel. We are bombarded with thousands upon thousands of social media pages and websites, devoted to polarized narratives. Every day I see someone who is a friend, or at the very least a person I assumed to be rational, post something that makes me shake my head. And of course, people act on that division much more now too. That constant cycle of information also covers people shouting or even shooting at each other in a rage of disagreement, setting aside any level of civility, compassion, or attempt to find a common ground. I find it a bit ironic to wave a flag and brag about our freedom when we are currently imprisoning children at our borders, and are just one Supreme Court nomination away from overturning Roe vs. Wade.” We can’t even agree on basic facts anymore, because we’re divided by the reasoning behind them. One side wants to believe natural disasters are a punishment from God for some moral failure, while the other points to the science of human manufactured climate change. It’s enough to make me wonder if sales of all the red, white and blue Made in China tchotchkes will be down. It’s difficult to really go all in celebrating our country when it seems so unrecognizable at the moment. The 4th of July is typically a holiday where patriotism is on full display. But according to a recent Gallup poll, a record number of Americans aren’t particularly proud of our country at the moment. I’m among them. I find it a bit ironic to wave a flag and brag about our freedom when we are currently imprisoning children at our borders, and are just one Supreme Court nomination away from overturning Roe vs. Wade, among other civil liberties. Of course, this isn’t the first July 4th we’ve had with the divider in chief in the White House. But last year, we still had some level of hope Congress would grow a pair and keep Trump in check. The general expectation was that our elected officials wouldn’t let him lead us to this breaking point. But they did. Most members of Congress couldn’t pour water out of a bucket if the instructions were written on the bottom, so I’m not sure why we assumed they’d throw themselves on the grenades he lobs at will. Any shred of hope that might happen disappeared a thousand tweets ago. My family is visiting for the holiday. We’ll walk in the parade and wave. We’ll “ooh” and “aah” at the fireworks. We’ll share food and drink with neighbors and friends. But I’m not sure we’ll do it all in any form of tribute to our country. Routine, maybe. Possibly hope. But pride? No, not this year. Amy Roberts is a freelance writer, longtime Park City resident and the proud owner of two rescued Dalmatians, Stanley and Willis. Follow her on Twitter @amycroberts. |