By Todd Wilkinson EBS ENVIRONMENTAL COLUMNIST
For many young people today, it might seem as if climate
change has only recently become a topic of fierce debate and, depending upon
one’s own world view, a subject ripe for deep denial.
“How can global warming be happening,” I heard one person
remark in Bozeman, “if it snows on the first official day of summer?”
Intense discussion about the effects of climate change, in
fact, have been going on for a long while, predating the arrival of members of
Generation Z, those born between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s.
The very same summer that historic forest fires swept across
Yellowstone National Park in 1988, members of the U.S. Senate were holding the
first formal hearings on climate change in Washington, D.C.
When the late George Herbert Walker Bush was elected president
later that year, his chosen director of the Environmental Protection Agency,
William K. Reilly, and Bush’s pick for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, John
Turner of Jackson Hole, accepted that the science of climate change was
compelling and needed attention.
In many ways, the attitude of that Republican Bush
Administration was more advanced than that of the Democratic Clinton
Administration that followed it and critics today say critical time in adopting
a strategy for addressing carbon emissions was squandered.
Many reports, analyses, computer models and field studies
have undertaken documenting average rising temperatures trending over time
along with forests and marshes drying out, new diseases appearing and water in
river systems heading lower faster in summer. And yet “windshield biologists” still
claim climate change isn’t happening.
One person who has influenced my own perspective is the now-retired
entomologist Dr. Jesse Logan who witnessed ecological changes long before many
others did. Logan spent decades studying beetle outbreaks as a researcher for
the U.S. Forest Service. Today he lives in Emigrant where, as a passionate
angler and backcountry skier, he’s paid attention to trends, not to fickle
weather variations occurring year to year.
Logan predicted the loss of Greater Yellowstone’s whitebark
pine forest decades ago caused by a combination of a pathogen called blister
rust, beetle infestations hastened by climate change, forest fires and a
general drying out of whitebark forests that leaves them more vulnerable to all
of the above.
Whitebark pine produces tiny little nutlike seeds in their
cones that nourish grizzly bears, Clark’s nutcrackers and red squirrels. With
grizzlies, those edibles high in fat and protein help keep the bruins
well-nourished and, for females, in better health to reproduce.
Scientific colleagues of Logan’s, like Dr. David Mattson,
now also retired and who spent years working for the Yellowstone Grizzly Bear
Study Team, have said whitebark pine has been one of the most important dietary
staples for grizzlies in our region, fueling rising numbers of bears.
Now, most of the whitebark pine forest that existed a human
generation ago is gone and the outlook for the trees that remain is bleak,
prompting researchers to say that whitebark, as a major seed producer, is
functionally extinct, forcing bears to seek other sources of nutrition.
Logan built an esteemed career over decades that made him
world-renowned. But he realized how serious the administration of George W.
Bush elected in 2000 was about downplaying the effects of global warming on
whitebark and grizzly bears after Logan was featured in a story in High Country
News during the summer of 2004.
While he was widely commended by Forest Service employees in
the field for expressing candor, it came to his attention that a high-level
official in Washington was upset.
“Everything I’ve learned to believe is that a free
press remains the cornerstone of our Democracy,” he told me. “But all
the media training I received as a senior scientist with the Forest Service is
how to spin things in order to protect the agency.”
It was not unusual for Mark Rey, the former timber industry
lobbyist and then Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for the George W. Bush
Administration overseeing the Forest Service, to call up and remind scientists
that “if you are ever asked about climate change, I know you’ll say the
right thing,” Logan says.
“With climate change,” Logan adds, “I felt
implicit and explicit censorship.”
Doug Honnold, a respected attorney now retired from the
environmental law firm Earthjustice, represented conservation organizations
that mounted a legal challenge to bear delisting.
Honnold helped prepare a proposal to give polar bears more
federal protection, based largely on the argument that as the sea ice melts,
thus eliminating the tool that bears use to access seals, they could be doomed.
In our part of the world, he and Logan wanted people to
ponder the rapidly diminishing presence of whitebark when they think about
grizzlies. On the land, climate change isn’t an abstraction.
“It’s already here,” Honnold told me a dozen years ago.
“Jesse is somebody who saw global warming many years ago and started studying
it and modeling it and unfortunately many of his projections came to be true.”
Todd Wilkinson is the founder of Bozeman-based Mountain Journal (mountainjournal.org) and is a correspondent for National Geographic. He’s also the author of “Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek” about famous Jackson Hole grizzly bear 399, which is available at mangelsen.com/grizzly.
