Photo of trees infested with MPB, from Canadian Forest Service
Bruce Sterling writes:
It's
both disquieting and liberating to realize that freedom doesn't require
any free will. Even phenomena as dumb and blind as lightning, wind and
rain have what physicists like to call "sensitivity to initial
conditions." Deterministic chaos. The Butterfly Effect.
This
means some tiny fate-altering sneeze of a butterfly can lead to a
Category Five Caribbean-born storm pancaking the pylons and powerlines
in Pensacola, Florida. Due to random whimsy, really. A hornet could do
a hurricane just as well, or a housefly.
I reported recently
about new research that suggests the cause of the collapse of the
Atlantic fishery was neither overfishing and pollution (as
environmentalists suggested) nor an abundance of seals (as the
fishermen suggested), but global warming. The authors argued that the
marine ecosystem is so complex that minor changes in air and ocean
temperature can trigger major changes in species at the bottom of the
food chain, which then ripple through the whole ecosystem, with
dramatic, sudden and unpredictable consequences. 'Unknowingness' and
unpredictability are the hallmarks of complex networks.
Now
there's evidence that the same thing could be happening to our forests.
The emphasis in forest ecosystem stewardship has been on combating
'invasive species' like the Asian longhorn beetle, regulated cutting,
replanting and fire management. But after five years and millions of
dollars spent in BC and Alberta alone combating the mountain pine
beetle (MPB), a native insect in Western highland coniferous forests, authorities have declared the battle lost.
Billions of the insect have ravaged lodgepole pines and moved on to
Douglas fir and interior spruce and other conifers. The focus now is on
helping bankrupt loggers avoid bankruptcy and find another living.
They
tried all the usual 'complicated' solutions: Clearcutting with
monoculture replanting. Controlled burns. Spraying and pheromone
trapping. Nothing worked. In the process, out of ignorance or
opportunism other tree species were also cut down. The canopy cover has
been lost. The fire danger of dead standing timber is substantial.
The
real danger, however, is that the starving beetles have not only jumped
to less hospitable conifers in their own mountain ecosystem, they've
moved East and started to infest the Boreal forest. That's the vast
forest that covers half of Canada, from the Rockies to the Atlantic. It
is one of the world's great carbon sinks. And arborists say there is
nothing standing in the way of the MPB devastating it, as it has
devastated the mountain forests of BC and Alberta.
What's going
on here? Well, the entomologists say the MPB thrives when several years
in a decade have warm winters and summer drought. That's exactly what's
happened in the past decade. And many of the birds that eat the beetle
have suffered inexplicable population losses. So the ecosystem is
wildly unbalanced, and as a result already 9.2 million hectares (36,000
square miles) of forest is exhausted or severely stressed.
It's
the story of the Atlantic cod all over again, except this time instead
of the devastation of marine life we're looking at the devastation of a
vast land area, and all the life that depends on it. All because one
beetle exploited a small sustained climate change. The butterfly effect
without wings.
So if all the complicated solutions don't work,
what should we do? The truth is we haven't the foggiest idea. When it
comes to complex networks, we don't have a clue. We don't know enough
-- can't know enough -- about
such networks to analyze them and determine cause and effect. We can't
predict what will happen. We just don't know. We're helpless to 'fix'
what is to us an unfathomable black box.
If we can't fix it, we can leave it to the expert. Nature has been balancing unbalanced systems for billions of years.
And we can adapt. That's what natural creatures do when environments change. My prescription, therefore, is radical and simple:
- We
need to combat global warming with every instrument and program at our
disposal. Contributing to it must be recognized and punished as the
criminal behaviour it is. We need to radically alter our lifestyles to
reduce carbon emissions by at least 90%, and damned soon.
- We
need to adapt and become resilient to abrupt changes in our ecosystems.
That means learning to live in a world without oil, coal, fish, and
trees -- and without the products (gasoline, plastics, chemicals, and
non-recycled wood and paper) made from them.
That's what we get for messing with complexity, mucking with things we don't understand. What will it take before we learn?
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