Climate's Challenge to a Sense of Place

Albert Bates

The Pulse, Fall 2006

In the 1980s I was approximately midway through my incarnation as an environmental attorney and ran a project out of The Farm called the Natural Rights Center. The central operating theme of the Center was that future peoples’ heritage of robust ecosystems should not be diminished by transgenerational tortfeasers like nuclear irradiators or mass-exterminators of senior species. We sued the bastards to protect the family jewels.

One of our perennial targets was the agricultural chemical industry which had been mining phosphates out of the Highland Rim (the lip of the larger bowl around the Nashville Basin) for the better part of a century and whose products were epidemiologically linked to higher rates of cancers and CNS disorders in much of the Cumberland Green Bioregion. In the course of arguments in a long-running battle over deepwell injection of organophosphate manufacturing byproducts, we found ourselves backed into a position of having to refute the ridiculous. Stauffer, Dupont, Xeneca, etc. argued that Tennessee has abundant surface water and need have no concern for the purity of its deep aquifer resource; that it was okay to inject a witches brew of lethal toxins for some future peoples to later discover seeping into their wells from West Central Tennessee to the Texas Gulf Coast.

In defense of our groundwater, we set out, in 1979, to prove that global warming was real and potentially serious, that water would be a resource of increasing scarcity and commensurate value in the not-distant future, and that pissing into a deepwell didn’t mean you wouldn’t eventually have to drink it. This led, over the following decade, to mustering thousands of studies on the relevant science and eventually to translating the results into lay language in my 1990 book, Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What You Can Do. After litigation, it also resulted in our Department of Health and Environment regulating deepwell injection out of existence and foisting the agrochemical industry upon other, less vigilant locations.

Since that time we have watched the steady march of isotherms northward, away from the equator and towards the pole. Global warming that was measured in 1979 to be increasing a fraction of a degree per century is now seen to be in a curve of acceleration never witnessed in natural history going back 800, 000 years and possibly 40 million years. In ice core studies, the fastest increase seen is on the order of 30 parts per million (ppm) carbon by volume over a period of roughly 1,000 years. A thirty ppm increase is what occurred in just the past 17 years. For those of us caretaking and gradually expanding the 2000-hectare Swan River watershed trust that includes The Farm, it means that our climate has begun to change, rapidly.

The climate that existed when we settled 320 hippies here in 1971 can now be found near Berea, Kentucky. Our climate regime today is what existed in central Mississippi in 1971. A quick trip 300 miles south shows an entirely different ecosystem prevailing there. There it is scrub pine. Here it is mixed hardwood, primarily red oak, owing to the clear-cuts of the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. This poses a serious challenge to our thinking as bioregionalists.

Our strategy for the past 30 years has been to re-establish native species like the juneberries, dogwoods and redbuds to replace those exported by Commodore Vanderbilt to Biltmore Estate in North Carolina in the last great railroad age. That strategy is now obsolete. We were fighting the last war, not the next one.

Today we need to think about aiding the migration of forests from South to North. The fastest runner in the tree kingdom is Spruce, which uprooted and dashed 700 miles per century as the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago. It was a dazzling and record-setting display, but not even Brother Spruce is fast enough to hold to the pace of the track we are witnessing in 2006.

How fast? Many northern insects hibernate in winter, placing themselves in a low-energy state that allows them to survive the extremes of northern winters. The sachem skipper butterfly (Atalopedes campestris), on the other hand, is a southern species, and it stays active through winter months. That makes it more vulnerable to being killed by sudden frost, and that determines how far north it can successfully breed. The range of the little skipper butterfly has expanded 420 miles from California to Washington State in just 35 years. In 1998 alone, the butterfly expanded its range north by 75 miles.

With these rates of warming the role of bioregionalists must morph from preservers of place to agents of change. We must be chastened by the warnings of Lovelock that ecosystems will be increasingly squeezed as the balance of biological activity on the planet tilts pole-ward. Bioregionalists must become permaculturists. Diverse forests have the resilience and mobility to host the necessary migrations of companion pollinators and mycorrhizae. Plantation forests do not. We must begin to recognize our role is changed. We are the midwives of the next ecosystem stasis. We are the bulwark that holds soil against spreading deserts. We need fewer people, more trees and the people we have need to reach out and aid the trees. If they fail, we fail, and our planet could follow the example of Mars.

Albert Bates

Albert Bates is a permaculture instructor at the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm community in Summertown, Tennessee and a Pulitzer Prize losing author of eleven books, including Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial (1979) and Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do (1990). His Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times is now available from New Society Publishers.