CHANGE IS COMING

In December 2008, a report was published that gave residents of the State of Jefferson a frightening look at our future: Preparing for Climate Change in the Rogue River Basin of Southwest Oregon. Produced by the Climate Leadership Initiative of the University of Oregon, the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, and the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S.D.A. Forest Service, this report summarized the latest global climate change models, and applied them to our region.

Here are some of the predicted changes that we face:

           Temperature

           ·  Annual average temperatures will increase by 1-3° F by 2040 and by 4-8° F by 2080

           ·  Summer temperatures may increase dramatically, averaging 7 to 15° F warmer by 2080

           ·  Winter temperatures may average an increase of 3 to 8° by 2080

           Precipitation and Snowpack

           ·  Total precipitation may remain roughly similar to historical levels, but…

·  Rising temperatures will cause more precipitation to fall as rain, rather than snow

·  Snow accumulation will decline by 25-75% by 2040, and may virtually disappear by

   2080

           Fires and Floods

           ·  More severe storm events, higher runoff events, and increased flooding are likely

·  Both wet and dry cycles are likely to last longer and be more extreme

·  Drastically increased wildfire is predicted for our region by most of the climate models

           Vegetation Patterns

           ·  Temperature increases and changes in precipitation patterns will lead to changes in

    vegetation, with wildfire and disease acting as catalysts

           ·  More of the basin will have growing conditions favorable for oaks, maples, ash, and

               other deciduous trees as well as for mixed pines and hardwoods

Faced with this sobering vision, Susan Cross of Medford’s Jefferson Nature Center created the community arts initiative “Shifting Patterns:  Preparing for Unsettled Days.”  This project, supported by the Oregon Arts Commission, brought together sixteen regional artists to create a community dialogue around the issue of climate change, and how to prepare for the likely new world in a realistic and yet somehow hopeful way.

As participating artists, Jim Chamberlain and I decided to use every medium at our disposal:  photography, scientific prose, and lyrical poetry.  This material ultimately led to a book, entitled Shifting Patterns:  Meditations on the Meaning of Climate Change in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, as well as a website, http://shiftingpatterns.org.   In the following pages, we present a sample of our meditations on the world to come.  For more, including resources for practical action, we invite interested readers to visit the Shifting Patterns website. 

These meditations are organized around the four classic ingredients of the world:  earth, air, fire, and water.  Each will change drastically in the world to come.  And, to reflect humanity’s undeniably dominant role in that world, we added a fifth element:  people.

EARTH:  PATTERNS ON THE LAND

We live in a patterned world.  Beyond the numerically ordered topography of houses, the grids of streets and roads, lies the pattern of life upon the land.  From an airplane high above, it looks like a tapestry: the pattern beautiful but abstract, too small to be readable.  From down here, it looks; well, it looks like trees, like grass.  The land is too large, we are too small, and again the pattern is unreadable, this time because we are too close.  And most of us have lost the skills to read the land anyway.  How many know the difference between a white oak and a black oak, a juniper and an incense-cedar?

But the pattern is there, nevertheless.  Learn your trees, and free your imagination into the perspective of the soaring hawk.  On every line of flight up the sides of the valley and into the mountains, you will reach heights where no more white oaks grow, where the lowest stands of white firs appear.  Here, and nowhere else around, is a patch of aspen.  Why?  Here, heading east, we suddenly encounter lodgepole pines where there were none before.  Why?  Alders grow only where it’s wet; junipers only where it’s dry. Why, exactly?

Plants have their limits.  Their abilities to tolerate this much heat, this much cold; this much water and this much drought have evolved over untold thousands of years, and are not, generally speaking, particularly flexible.  Our forests integrate the ever-changing variables of climate, and lay it out for us in their patterns on the land.  Those closest to the land can read that pattern and live their lives accordingly, whether they are butterflies or birds or the people who lived well in these valleys and mountains for centuries before our arrival.

But the pattern we see is a thing of the past.  Climate change means that the long-term integration performed by our forests is based on outmoded assumptions.  The way things have been is not the way things will be.  For that, the least we can say is:  We’re sorry.  And mean it. 

The plain truth is, we have almost no idea of what is coming.  What will the new pattern on the land look like?  Will there even be a pattern, or will the rapidity of change, the spread of diseases and infestations, and the devastations of wildfire mean that the landscape falls into chaos, a patchwork of wounds and scars?

Perhaps, for a time.  Perhaps for a long time.  But nature is a powerful organizing system.  Patterns will re-emerge.  They may be unlike anything we imagined, but they will have their own beauty.  Let us hope they have the time they need to grow from the beauty that is, and not from the ashes.

MADRONE DANCE

No tree, standing still, moves as you move

No limbs so bare, so sleek, so suited for the dance

You crouch and stride, balance and curve

Arms aloft, the art of gesture is yours, all yours

And the pines stand around you

Stiff with scandalized admiration

O madrone, dance now, dance

As never, dance up the mountainside

Fast and faster than ever you have done

Use the birds, all of them, the flocking

Robins and waxwings, the starlings and thrushes

In these hot days, burst with berries

Send them far and wide, send them

      Always higher, find that place

Still cool but below the hardest cold

Dry, but above the cracking earth

The time has come to run

You, madrone, cannot run

So, dance

WATER:  THE CHANGELING

Water vapor has no simple fate.  It may condense, form a cloud, and then evaporate, again invisible and alone in the clear blue sky.  It may settle as fog, nourishing a giant redwood, or condense as dew, decorating a spiderweb.  Or it may fall, as rain or sleet or hail or snow.

In ways that we too often disregard, the fate of water vapor is entangled with our own.  In the Rogue Valley, the form of water’s fall makes all the difference.  The usual way of reporting our precipitation – inches of rainfall per year – conceals this essential fact.  More than by any other change, global warming threatens us with a seemingly simple magic trick:  transforming snow into rain.

The water supply of our valley rests on the shoulders of two very different mountains, Mount McLoughlin and Mount Ashland.  Mount McLoughlin is a great Cascadian volcano, 9495 feet tall, with the bulk, symmetry, and grace of youth.  Its main cone is thought to be only 200,000 years old, a mere stripling as mountains go.  The snows of its treeless peak melt down into the pure, gushing abundance of Big Butte Springs and Butte Creek, which supply the Rogue River, and the city of Medford, with clean, clear, cold water all summer long.

Twenty-five miles to the southwest, on the opposite side of the Bear Creek valley, rises Mount Ashland, not as a great isolated cone, but rather as the highest peak on a ridgeline of battered granite buttes, the front range of the Siskiyou Mountains.  This is a different geological world from the Cascades.  Mount Ashland is no volcano, but the top of an ancient, folded, recrystallized, uplifted, and eroded block of Mesozoic seabed, more than 150 million years old.

 Though Mount Ashland is the highest peak in the Siskiyous, it reaches only 7532 feet.  Its heavily forested north-facing slopes gather snow all winter, and release it in the spring to feed Ashland Creek, the sole water source for the city of Ashland.  On its southern slopes, the melting snow makes a very different journey, flowing south into California to feed Grouse and Cottonwood Creeks, and finally the Klamath River.

Without the snows of Mount Ashland and Mount McLoughlin, we would live in a completely different valley.  We would face a fate of drought and fire. Is that our future?

FIRE:  THE EVER-HUNGRY

In the Rogue Basin country, fire is the danger.  Fuel is, after all, everywhere:  fine dry grass, tindery tangled fields of buckbrush and manzanita, and up into the mountain forests, wood, wood everywhere.  And for at least four months of every year, it all wants to burn.

Our fire problem is not simple.  It is a dense thicket of meteorology, topography, geology, ecology, and the history of human management and mismanagement.  This last, perhaps, most of all, because it is human actions that have changed fire from a routine and renewing aspect of the natural cycle into a catastrophic threat.

Over the century and a half of pioneering settlement, we have created this threat in three principal ways:  livestock grazing that has promoted the conversion of grassland and meadows to brushfield and thickets; fire suppression that has prevented regular fuel removal by moderate ground fires; and our habit of building permanent homes everywhere – increasingly inside the forest itself.

To these three, we are now adding a fourth:  climate change.  All the models for our climate future forecast a shocking increase in forest fires for the Rogue Basin.

Lessened snowpack will mean earlier soil drying and a longer fire season.  Higher temperatures will add to drying, and the heightened energy in the atmosphere may increase lightning strikes and fire ignitions.  Drought stress brought on by lower snowpack may increase tree mortality, providing more fuels.  And, perversely, increased atmospheric carbon dioxide will likely enhance plant growth during the growing season, further adding to fuel loads.

Our present policy is to stop fires everywhere and always, with the exception of very limited controlled burns.  Like bailing with a teacup, this will work only so long.

Facing the future, we face into the fire.

AFTER THE FIRE

These mountains have walked through fire
The burned and the unburned
The living and the dead
Held in layered embrace
The pine bark’s jigsaw a maze
Of the consumed and the whole

And across the forest the layers
Lie heaped and crosswise
The charred logs and the black bristling spires
The stripped snags shocking in their nakedness
The very stones pulled from the earth
For all to see

So: the layers of death
But among and between,
The layers of life
Green flows from the open wounds
Ooze of berry vines, gush of beargrass
The tanoak in great misshapen scabs

Death is inevitable, that we know
Life is inevitable, that we see
The fire has turned the forest upside down
Death and life have changed their places
But both abide, both wait
As the mountains walk on

AIR:  ABOVE THE MOUNTAINTOPS

For residents of the Bear Creek valley, the top of our world is the peak of Mount Ashland, 7532 feet.  Of course, once we arrive on that mountaintop, we see that the horizon is ringed with higher peaks:  Mount McLoughlin and Mount Eddy, both over 9000 feet, and of course Mount Shasta, 14,179 feet high.  But this is our only local alpine zone, right at timberline, the last storm-stunted firs staggering up the slope toward the granite peak.  Here, all the bird songs rise from below:  the junco’s trill, the Rock Wren’s jumbled music, the melody of the Fox Sparrows, sweet and rich.  The songs pass, they rise into the sky, and they are gone.

In July, the granite sand that serves as soil on Mount Ashland is rich with wildflowers, drinking in the fleeting store of melted snow.  The open ground is clustered with dwarf Mount Ashland lupine, an endemic to this narrow mountaintop, its lovely blue blooms to be seen only here in all the world.  And there are the fuzzy pink clumps of pussypaws, the mounds of carpet phlox, the sulfurous yellow of desert buckwheat, all plants trained by a thousand years of wind to hug the earth, here on the top of the world. In the shelter of the boulder fields, taller flowers dare to grow, some reaching almost a foot in height:  the deep violet trumpets of penstemon, the sun-yellow spires of arnica.  And all are alive with butterflies in this fleeting season of plenty.

The Siskiyous are not a tall mountain range.  Their high peaks, Mount Ashland, Dutchman’s Peak, Wagner Butte, Condrey Mountain, are a scattered archipelago of tiny islands of alpine habitat, rising out of a dark green sea.  These are the only places in our neighborhood where certain plants, like Mount Ashland lupine; certain butterflies, like the lovely white Mountain Parnassian, and certain birds, like the Fox Sparrow, find the world they need.  Climate change threatens to drown these islands in a rising tide of trees.  By the end of this century, and perhaps much sooner, Fox Sparrows and Mountain Parnassians may be gone from the Siskiyous, and the tiny, tough, and lovely Mount Ashland lupine may be extinct, lost forever from the face of the earth, surviving only in our photographs, and in our fading memories.

MOUNTAIN HAIKU

                                                Up the mountain slopes
Songs of birds drift slowly past
Rise into the sky

Mount Ashland lupine
Upon its single peak
Waits for nothing to change

                                                Silver mountain peak
Is this to be your fate?
To be drowned in trees?

                                                Some snow feeds the stream
Some rises into the sky
Below, the valley waits

PEOPLE

Beyond the classic ingredients that form the world - earth, air, fire, and water - we must now acknowledge another:  people.  Like it or not, humanity is an essential component of all the living systems on the planet, and how we behave will determine the future not just of ourselves, but of every living thing.

Here in the Rogue Valley, the hand of humanity lies lightly on the land, compared to many places.  Our population is fairly small, and we live surrounded by beautiful wild country.  Farmland still occupies a substantial portion of the valley floor, and most economic activity is relatively small scale and local.  Here, it is still possible to imagine creating a network of interdependent communities that are environmentally and economically sustainable.

But there is no escaping the consequences of human activity.  Globally, the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continues undiminished, and will warm our climate no matter what local efforts we make.  Year by year, the population of our valley grows, more land is lost to development, more vehicles fill our roads, and more demands are placed on our water supply and other environmental support systems. 
Like all animals, human beings are, most fundamentally, consumers.  We seek abundance, safety, and ease, and have been remarkably successful at getting them.  Unfortunately, at the base of it all is the flawed assumption that our consumption of the world’s good things can increase forever.  Sooner or later, that assumption was bound to catch up with us.  Thanks to climate change, it looks like it’s going to be sooner.

That may not be a bad thing.  It seems that difficult times are ahead, but learning the hard lessons of sustainability can only be good for us all.  Humans are consumers, yes, but we are also capable of astounding generosity, imagination, creativity, and compassion. Through our gifts for poetry and science, mathematics and music, we may yet find a way to balance our desires with our needs, and take our place within the world, not apart from it.

This is the time to begin.

FINDING A BALANCE

Let us close, neither high or low, but in the middle; the mid-elevation of our Rogue Basin.  Here is a place of retreat, of hermitage – for snow, for deer and bears, and for human beings.  Within this dark forest, much is hidden.  Never lush, but always with an austere sufficiency for those who can master their desires, this is the least-changing zone of our valley.  It holds our water, our carbon, and our mountain soils in a broad band of silence, between the hectic valley and the seasonally sweet, seasonally bitter mountaintop meadows and ridges.  If there is to be any place of ecological stability in our world to come, it will lie here.

The lingering question for us, the reluctant stewards of a warming planet, is whether we can find in ourselves a similar refuge of rugged moderation and delicate balance.  What choice is left to us but to work, and hope?

THE WORLD TO COME

The world to come will not be blessed
Yet may you be
Blessed in strength for those hard times             
Blessed in love
For love is always blessed
Blessed in courage to conquer the fear 
That will seek an easy victory
Blessed in peace that you create
For there will be no other                                              
Blessed in hope
For a better world to come