Changing Places

For the last couple of weeks, I've been exploring plant distributions and climate, past and present, revisiting old insights and formulating new ones, some of which I'll be sharing here in time. We know that change is inevitable, but global natural change perceptible within the short scale of human lifetimes is an unusual, though not unique, phenomenon. We are likely in or on the very brink of something unprecedented in human history.

Anna Mills, at On Nature Writing, challenges nature writers to address this concern, and wonders where our best known of them stand on this issue. She also says "We need a nature literature by and for the laity," so the rest of us can help too, on a smaller scale:

Personal essays create a sense of intimacy and make space for irreverent, exploratory, self-critical, humorous reflection, even on a topic as nauseating as the cooking of the biosphere.

This week at Natural Patriot, Emmett Duffy addresses climate change during human history, at least the last few centuries, providing links to original research that suggests some of the side effects we can expect. I'm also particularly fond of his post from last year on The Nature of Natural, which discusses shifting baselines, a critical and generational component of this issue.

This week, I'm reading James Lovelock's book, The Revenge of Gaia, in which he warns us that although humanity will likely survive Gaia's fever, the extinction of civilization could well result from the changes ahead of us. Gaia can operate at a different steady state; life on Earth will survive, but it will be a different life. He shares some of his thoughts in this article.

On the immediate human scale, as our climates shift, what will become of our attachment to place? Will our loyalties shift with the ecological settings we recognize, or will we remain geographically attached to locations that grow increasingly unfamiliar around us? Will we come to care, as a society, even less than we do today?

Colorado now hosts a diverse assortment of ecosystems and habitats. Though its east and west portions are quite different, the mountainous center of the state is part of a southward intrusion of northern environments, a long discontinuous peninsula or island chain of boreal forests and alpine tundra. It's a fascinating place to be an ecologist or plant enthusiast because of this lateral and altitudinal diversity. Instead of going north to find trees and tundra, we go west (or east).

This year, I'll find remnant boreal forests just a few thousand feet higher and a dozen miles west of where I sit today. How far will we have to go in the years to come?