Imagine you live in New York City, and one fine morning you
awake to the realization that 90 percent of all the buildings
that were more than five stories tall have been destroyed. You
will hardly have the words to talk about this devastation, but
I'm sure you will walk around the rubble to make sense of it
all.
Something similar has happened in and around Santa Fe, New
Mexico, where I currently live. Between 2001 and 2005, aerial
surveys were conducted over 6.4 million acres of the state. Some
816,000 affected acres were mapped and it was found that during
this short period Ips confusus, a tiny bark beetle, had killed
54.5 million of New Mexico's state tree, the piñon. In many
areas of northern New Mexico, including Santa Fe, Los Alamos,
Española, and Taos, 90 percent of mature piñons are now dead.
Under normal climate conditions, bark beetles live in harmony
with their environment, laying their eggs in dead or weakened
trees. However, when healthy trees become stressed from severe
and sustained drought, they become objects of attack: the
beetles drill into their bark, laying eggs along the way, and
killing their host. Milder winter temperatures have ensured more
of them survive the winter, and warmer summer temperatures have
reduced the life cycle duration of the beetles from two to one
year, and subsequently their numbers have exploded in recent
years.
In March 2006, my then-future wife Nora and I rented a house in
Eldorado, a suburban community about 15 miles southeast of Santa
Fe. Each day as I drove from our home to the nearby city, all
along the way on both sides of the road I'd see large areas of
grey-brown (dead piñons) in the midst of green (live junipers).
During my childhood in India, I was fascinated by the detective
stories of Satyajit Ray's Feluda series. Because of the forest
devastation I witnessed daily, I took on the role of a
self-assigned visual detective of a geographic region bound by a
5-mile radius around our home. I walked again and again the same
three paths, each no more than 2 miles long.
As I repeated my walks, I gradually began to realize that the
environment around our home in the desert is perhaps as
biodiverse as the arctic, where I have been taking photographs
for the past decade. In both regions, one far and one near, I am
attempting to address two simple things: home and food that land
provides to humans as well as to numerous other species with
whom we share this earth.
I'll share with you a few experiences and a little bit of what I
learned from these walks.
From a distance I see a large dead piñon with a canopy that
spreads more than 20 feet. I can determine from the canopy size
that the tree was more than 600 years old when it died. Piñons
take nearly 300 years to mature and can live up to 1,000 years.
As I get closer to the dead tree, I notice the damaged skin with
many protrusions that look like soft yellow globs or lines. Such
skin is visual evidence that the tree did not die a normal
death, but instead put up a fight against beetles by sending out
sap to drown them in resin. In the end the tree lost, as the
number of beetles the tree was fighting was far too many. I've
never seen a bark beetle, whose size is no bigger than a grain
of rice, and I doubt you'll see one either, but if you look
closely at the skin of one of these dead piñons you will know
that the beetles were here and that the tree fought hard.
Occasionally I see a beautiful northern flicker pecking away at
a dead tree trunk, either building a nest or looking for food –
insects that have come to break down the dead tree. In the
process, the flicker will create perfectly circular holes. These
cavities will become possible homes for gorgeous western and
mountain bluebirds. Even after death these dead piñons provide
home and food for many species.
On my walks I also come across areas that resemble graveyards,
where every piñon in immediate sight is dead. But I continue to
see birds resting on the branches of these dead trees. And when
I wait patiently, sometimes I am rewarded with the sight of a
tiny black–chinned hummingbird, which weighs less than 1/2
ounce, on top of a 20–foot–high dead piñon as it catches its
breath briefly before buzzing off to feed on a cluster of
bright–orange Indian paintbrush.
Piñon trees produce protein–rich nuts once every four to seven
years. Nut eaters like Piñon Jays critically depend on piñon
nuts for sustenance, but they also serve a very important role
in the regeneration of piñon woods. A typical flock of 50 to 500
birds can cache more than 4 million piñon seeds in a good year
in New Mexico, and uneaten seeds result in new trees.
For Native American communities of the desert southwest, piñon
tree has been of immense cultural, spiritual, and economic
importance for many millenia. The nut is extensively harvested
throughout its range. It has been a staple for a long time and
continues to be eaten and used in cooking today.
This is not the first time that piñon forests have been
destroyed. It has been suggested that the ancient Pueblo people
of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico overharvested the piñon–juniper
woodlands around their community to support the growing need of
timber for fuel and building materials. In the process they
deforested woodlands that eventually contributed to their
abandoning the magnificent community they had built. Even
more extensive devastation occurred during the late nineteenth
and throughout the twentieth century, when vast areas of piñon
woodlands were deforested to support cattle ranching, which
indigenous communities and others regard as a major act of
ecocultural vandalism.
According to a fascinating book,
Ancient Piñon-Juniper Woodlands: A Natural History of Mesa Verde
Country, biologists have recently begun to define the
piñon–juniper woodland as an old–growth forest. This ecosystem
supports an incredible diversity of wildlife, including 250 bird
species (50 percent of all bird species west of Mississippi and
more than a quarter of bird species in the U.S. and Canada), 74
species of mammals, 17 species of bats, 10 amphibian species,
and 27 species of reptiles. Sadly, junipers are also
dying (in lesser numbers so far) from extreme heat and
drought. When I started my walks, I did not realize that there
existed an old–growth forest in the New Mexican desert.
Every time I call my mom in India she complains about how hot
this summer has been. This year we had the
hottest first six months globally since recording began in
1880. In Santa Fe, we broke the June high temperature record
with a 100oF (average high is 83oF), the
July record with another 100oF (average high is 86oF),
and with 95oF already we’ve tied the August record
(average high is 83oF).
So it is no surprise that many of our remaining live piñons are
again oozing soft yellow pitches. As it happens, these piñons
were blooming last year and now they have beautiful green cones
that will mature with nuts. These piñons are
fighting–and–fruiting right now for their survival but they are
infected and will die.
Even reforestation is taking on a different meaning in the
twenty–first century. Young piñon trees have little chance of
surviving extreme heat and drought. Each time I drive on
Cerrillos Road to get to Interstate 25, I see a line of recently
planted piñons, but some of the young trees are already dead,
and I surmise the others might be infected.
If we lose our remaining piñons in the coming decades due to
global warming, how would we then talk about the tree that has
been ecoculturally most significant for New Mexico and its
Native American communities for thousands of years?
Forests Are Dying Across the American West and All Over the
World
In 2004, Michelle Nijhuis
reported in High Country News that several species of
bark beetles were ravaging forests all across the American West.
The black spruce, white spruce, ponderosa pine, lodglepole pine,
whitebark pine, and piñon have all been devastated by recent
bark beetles epidemic. Scientists now suspect that by killing
our forests, these beetles are also
altering the local weather patterns and air quality.
Earlier this year, the U.S. senate had scheduled a hearing on
the bark beetle epidemic, but, angered by the passage of the
healthcare bill, Senate Republicans
canceled the hearing on March 23. The hearing
was finally held on April 21. Senator Mark Udall
(Democrat-Colorado), co–sponsor of the National Forest Insect
and Disease Emergency Act,
wrote in his senate blog, “The infestation is a critical
public health and safety issue for the people of Colorado and
has been called the worst natural disaster our region has seen.”
The bill names twelve states affected by the epidemic: Arizona,
California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico,
Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. This list
should also include Alaska, where spruce bark beetles have
destroyed very large areas of spruce forests, some of which
I saw during my time there.
The hearing mainly focused on offering tens of millions of
dollars of federal assistance to remove dead trees from affected
areas to avoid potential forest fire damage. Ecologist Dominik
Kulakowski, who testified, thought it was an unproductive
approach and said that if the government focuses on trying “to
make a wholesale modification of forest structure over large
landscapes,” it could be ecologically damaging.
Was the hearing a case of destroy and then clean up
– a common practice in our now global consumerist culture?
In March, Jim Robbins
reported in Yale Environment 360 that global warming
is killing forests across the American West as well as in many
parts of the world. So I asked my colleagues for local
observations.
In 2006, I spent time in Old Crow, a Vuntut Gwitchin First
Nation Arctic community in northern Yukon, Canada. At that time
I knew nothing about the forest death that was happening in the
southern Yukon. In a recent email to me, Roger Brown, the
Forestry and Environmental Manager of the
Champagne and
Aishihik First Nations, wrote, “Canada’s largest ever
documented spruce bark beetle outbreak began 18 years ago and is
continuing to affect our forests in the southwestern Yukon.
Approximately 380,000 hectares of our white spruce dominated
forests have been affected, with almost 100 percent mortality of
the forest canopy in some areas. Our oral history research has
suggested there is no traditional knowledge that speaks about
such extensive tree deaths in the past.”
In early June, as United Nations climate negotiators were
wrapping up their
unsuccessful meeting in Bonn, Germany, Anne-Marie Melster,
founder and co-director of ARTPORT, wrote from Valencia, “Here
in Spain, at the Mediterranean coast, the picudo rojo (red
palm weevil) is attacking and killing tens of thousands of
palm trees.”
About the same time, Ananda Banerjee, a conservation journalist
from New Delhi, emailed me. “The
sal forest in north-central India is home to the endangered
tiger,” he said. “In the last few years there has been wide
spread destruction and felling of infected sal trees, from the
attack of a pest beetle called the sal borer. We have around
1,10,000 sq. km area of sal forest in India, but the green cover
is gradually depleting due to this pest and due to illegal
harvest of sal as timber.”
If you are interested in a broad scientific understanding of
forest deaths from global warming, you can read an
article published earlier this year in Forest Ecology and
Management. It is worth noting the names of countries listed
in the article with forest mortality data that have been
recorded since 1970.
Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China,
France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy,
Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway,
Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Spain,
South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Switzerland,
Uganda, USA, and Zimbabwe
Global warming skeptics would point to the fact that trees have
died in the past from insect outbreaks and droughts, and so this
is part of a natural climate cycle. But this time around
something is very different: Forests are dying simultaneously in
many places around the world in all forest types, and the
intensity and rapidity with which they are dying in some places
is of epic proportions.
As I started thinking about our dead forests, I wondered: Do we
really need another story of global warming devastation? Haven’t
we heard enough about melting glaciers and icebergs, retreating
sea ice and disappearing polar bears? Then something tugged on
my shoulder: Are we not to mourn the deaths of so many trees?
But we mourn that which we knew and cared for. We did not know
these trees. My hope has been to introduce to you the trees as
ecological beings beyond their usual association as
board–feet–for–lumber.
Hundreds of millions of trees have recently died and many more
hundreds of millions will soon be dying. Now think of all the
other lives, including birds and animals, that depended on those
trees. The number of these must be in the tens of billions. What
happened to them and how do we talk about that which we can’t
see and will never know? This massive loss must be considered a
catastrophic global warming event.
Our “Carbon Sinks” Are Becoming “Carbon Sources”
Consider for a moment the top two
carbon sinks of our planet. Oceans absorb more than 25
percent of the CO2 humans put in the air, and forests
absorb almost the same amount. By doing so, our forests and
oceans together make living possible on this earth for life as
we know it now. All of that is changing rapidly and for the
worse.
Didn’t we learn as kids in school that CO2 in the
atmosphere is good for trees because it acts as a fertilizer and
helps them grow? Increasing levels of CO2 in the
atmosphere from industrialization indeed may have aided more
trees to grow in the past century. But such short–term gain has
already faded away and turned into disaster. All three of the
largest forests of the world are rapidly losing their carbon
sink capacities.
The Siberian taiga is the largest continuous stretch of forested
land on earth. It extends from the Urals in the west to the
Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East. Ernst–Detlef
Schulze of the Max–Planck–Institute for Biogeochemistry has
studied this taiga for 30 years. He calls it “Europe’s
green lungs,” as these trees soak up much of the CO2
emitted by European smokestacks and automobiles farther west.
Long stretches of extreme droughts have resulted in
unprecedented
forest fires that destroyed vast swathes of the taiga. Major
deforestation is also happening there to fuel the need of (now)
emerged economies such as China. And the fir sawyer beetle,
larch bark beetle, and Siberian moth have also
damaged large areas of the taiga.
This year Russia is experiencing the hottest summer ever, which
has resulted in deadly forest fires with
smokes over Moscow that made international headlines. Boreal
forests of eastern Siberia are also ablaze with
intense fires. Scientists have recently detected a
poisonous ring around the planet created by an enormous
cloud of pollutants that are being released by raging forest
fires in central Russia, Siberia, and Canada.
In November 2007, I went to the
Sakha Republic of Siberia with Inupiat hunter and
conservationist Robert Thompson from Arctic Alaska. While
camping with the Even reindeer herders in the Verkhoyansk
Range, the coldest inhabited place on earth, we experienced
temperatures of minus 65oF (without wind–chill) and
were told that January temperature dip to minus 90oF.
We also spent time with the Yukaghir community at
Nelemnoye along the Kolyma River, made infamous by Stalin’s
Gulag camps. We learned that even in such a cold place, the
Siberian permafrost is melting rapidly during the summer months
due to warming.
In Siberia, with the destruction of taiga and thawing of
permafrost, the ghosts–of–gulags are ready to strike back at us
with a deadly carbon bomb that we know little about.
The North American boreal forest stretches across U.S. and
Canada from Alaska in the west to Newfoundland in the east,
making it the second largest continuous forested ecosystem on
earth. It is now
confirmed that a lodgepole pine forest in British Columbia,
Canada, that died from bark beetles outbreak has transformed
from being a small net carbon sink to being a large net carbon
source. We can probably say the same for all the other bark
beetles infecting dying forests across the west.
The Amazon rainforest is the largest tropical forest on earth
and stretches across nine countries – Brazil, Peru, Columbia,
Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French
Guiana. I’ve never been to the Amazon, but I’m learning that
forest fires, droughts, and deforestation have already destroyed
very large areas of this forest. The Amazon is in great trouble:
Scientists are predicting that a 4oC temperature rise
would
kill 85 percent of the Amazon. With climate inaction so far,
we are heading rapidly toward such a reality.
The news is equally bad for our oceans, which are now
struggling to keep up with the rising CO2
emissions from human activities. By absorbing all that CO2
the oceans are becoming
horrendously acidic, threatening the survival of marine
life. To make matters worse, methane that is 20 times more
potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas is being released
in enormous quantities from some of our oceans, including the
East Siberian Arctic Shelf, due to thawing of subsea
permafrost there, and the Gulf of Mexico, due to BP’s
unforgiveable spill. Two studies have shown
methane concentrations in some areas of the gulf reached
100,000 times higher than normal with few hot spots close to a
million times higher. And recently we learned that 40
percent of the world’s phytoplankton died in the last 60 years
due to global warming, raising the question, “Are
Our Oceans Dying?”
Our natural carbon sinks are losing the battle with global
warming, increasing human CO2 emissions, and
extreme oil–and–gas drilling. Every citizen of our planet
should be asking the question: Who or what will capture the
carbon that we continue to emit? And every government ought to
address this question as the most urgent priority if we are to
ensure life on Earth.
Our New Climate Movement
Last month the U.S. Senate finally put an end to the climate
bill. Since then several opinion pieces have been published,
including articles in
Yale Environment 360,
Grist,
TomDispatch,
The Nation, and
The Hill. Some of these point out why the U.S. climate
movement failed, while others call for a new movement.
Global warming is a crisis: for all lands, for all oceans, for
all rivers, for all forests, for all humans, for all birds, for
all mammals, for all little creatures that we don’t see... for
all life. We need stories and actions from every part of our
earth. So far, global warming communications have primarily
focused on scientific information. I strongly believe that to
engage the public, we need all fields of the humanities. It is
to this end that I founded
ClimateStoryTellers.
And there is much action: globally,
350.org and
Climate Justice Movement; nationally, organizations such as
Center for Biological Diversity; and state-based initiatives
such as
New Energy Economy in New Mexico. These groups give us hope
that a bold – not weak – climate movement will continue to move
forward with renewed energy.
Our task is to make the collective global voice louder and
louder until ignoring such loud cacophony will not be an option
by our governments. Global warming is not something we can solve
with good behavior and healthy lifestyles. It will require major
government action to control pollution–and–polluters and to
start a low–carbon–society.
I’ll end with two simple questions:
Will the economic–and–comfort–needs of our species
always trump the survival–needs of all other species that also
inhabit this Earth?
&
By not taking serious action on global warming, is
humanity committing a colossal crime against all other lives on
Earth?
Subhankar Banerjee is a photographer, writer, activist, and
founder of
ClimateStoryTellers. His desert photographs will be
presented in a solo exhibition, “Where
I Live I Hope To Know,” at the Amon Carter Museum of
American Art in Fort Worth (May 14–August 28, 2011) and in group
exhibitions “(Re–)
Cycles of Paradise” at the Centro Cultural de España in
Mexico City (November 11, 2010–January 16, 2011) and “Earth
Now: American Photographers and the Environment” at the New
Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe (April 18–August 28, 2011). His
arctic photographs will be presented in a solo exhibition “Resource
Wars in the American Arctic” at the School of Fine Art
Gallery at Indiana University in Bloomington (October
22–November 19, 2010) and in group exhibition “The Altered
Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment” at the Nevada
Museum of Art in Reno (September 24, 2011–February 19, 2012).
Subhankar is currently editing an anthology titled “Arctic
Voices.” You can visit his website by clicking
here.
[Note on photographs: To view Subhankar’s forest death
photos from New Mexico click
here. This album was curated to accompany this piece.]
[Note for readers: I’d like to thank my long–time
collaborator and the editor of this piece
Christine
Clifton–Thornton; to Roger Brown, Anne-Marie Melster, and
Ananda Banerjee for sharing their observations for this piece;
and always to
Tom Engelhardt for his support and inspiration.]
Copyright 2010 Subhankar Banerjee
To subscribe or visit go to:
http://www.climatestorytellers.org/