A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with thirty other Wisconsin leaders to recommend environmental topics that public radio should be covering in the coming year. Climate change and its impacts was a common concern, as was water quality, environmental degradation from agricultural policy and practices, and the call for more education and environmental literacy. When numerous compelling issues rise through a deliberative conversation, there is temptation to lump topics together, or split them into categories as often happens in a meeting where you are trying to narrow the list. Can you separate water issues from climate? Sure, but it is artificial. Esteban Chiriboga, representing the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLFWC) reminded the group that of course all these issues are connected and part of the “whole” of life that needs our attention and care.
Just a few days prior to this event, I had been sitting on the point for which Sand Point is named in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Lake Superior’s south shore. It was warm and windy, and we were there for the sunset over the Grand Island forest across the bay. The winds were whipping up waves, and stirring the surface water over currents that pull around the point, creating splashes where the spray of water droplets momentarily reflected the horizontal light from the west. I’m easily gobsmacked by nature’s beauty, and I tried to be simply present and take in the light playing on the water, the clear waves, the clean sand. But as we could tell from the aura around the setting sun, the haze around us was a product, not of summer humidity, but of smoke from the western fires. We could smell and taste the traces of fires burning nearly 3,000 miles away. It might have been Jasper National Park, or California, or both.
It made me cherish Pictured Rocks even more, because like other spectacular natural areas, it is never really “safe” or “protected” in a world in environmental crisis. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel the weight of the extraordinary losses from the catastrophic wildfires. In the case of the Jasper fire, online critics piled on the Canadian Park Service for not taking prior action to address the massive tree die-offs caused by mountain pine beetles over the last two decades, but aggressive invasive species and their impact are difficult to manage on the scale of the vast forests of the Rocky Mountains. While the dead trees were probably a contributory factor, a story in the National Post quoted a forest scientist stating, “ultimately they were not as pivotal as the high winds, hot temperatures and overall dry conditions.”
Climate change is driving the heat and dry conditions in the west. Inadequately regulated global commerce has brought invasive species that wreak havoc in already stressed forest ecosystems. Healthy forests help protect headwaters and water quality, quantity, and habitat; they also store carbon and return oxygen to the atmosphere. All these factors are connected across the living land and waters, and within their living inhabitants, including us. To forge solutions we must seek and try to understand these complex intertwined relationships and how one thread can affect all the others.
Some of my most powerful experiences in nature were at Jasper National Park decades ago. To taste her ashes in my mouth, and carry remnant particles of her once-verdant forests in my lungs makes those memories more visceral—a personal call to action to do more. Yes, we must protect places close to home and tackle specific issues in their various silos along the way, but the wholeness is sending its call for help across the biosphere. Let us rise to the call.
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