Another sign of Arctic warming was reported in the Alaska Dispatch last week. According to a new study by scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Geological Survey, moose have expanded their range by following the spread of shrubs all the way to the north side of the Colville River.
But even if scientists weren’t on the ground measuring and analyzing their findings, hunters would have been well aware of the new food source roaming the tundra. It’s the kind of personal observations that would have made a good story for last week’s Science & Storytelling event sponsored by the Island Institute of Sitka.
The goal of the institute’s program is to explore “the impacts and implications of climate change on culture, lifestyle, heritage, and economies.” Their approach is to consider the long history of sustainable subsistence practices of indigenous people. It’s a method that relies on personal and community stories for describing changes in natural patterns instead of an analysis of scientifically collected data.
This way of understanding our world existed long before the advent of scientific inquiry. But even in our modern era it’s been people’s observations that first uncovered many, if not most, of the world’s slowly emerging environmental disasters.
For instance, citizen concerns about the widespread death of birds in communities using chemicals for pest control that prompted the scientific study of DDT. And the investigation of groundwater contamination in the Love Canal neighborhood was triggered by high rates of leukemia among residents.
The same order of discovery happened 85 years ago during the Dust Bowl. That story is recognized by many historians to have been America’s worst environmental disaster.
It began when the federal government encouraged farming across the relatively arid Great Plains. They proclaimed its soil to be “the one resource that cannot be exhausted.”
But beginning in 1930, a severe drought throughout the region led to massive crop failures on over 100 million acres. The combination of exposed soil and the strong winds which frequently blew across the open plains produced deadly dust storms. One of them deposited 12 million tons of fine soil in its tracks as it traveled all the way to the Atlantic Coast.
About 3.5 three million people abandoned their homes. But many of those who refused to leave believed the drought and dust storms were part of a naturally recurring cycle. They expected to resume large scale wheat faming as soon as the rain returned.
Hugh Bennett was a North Carolina soil scientist who had referred to farming-related erosion as a national menace two years before the Dust Bowl began. But it took several years before there was a scientific consensus about causes of the disaster. Mainly they agreed the natural grasslands never should have been stripped for the sake of commodity crops.
Bennett described the reckless assault on the Great Plains grasslands as human hubris and ignorance. “Of all the countries in the world,” he said, “we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized.”
However, most farmers couldn’t have been expected to predict how the invention of the internal combustion engine would make the Dust Bowl possible. Gas powered tractors allowed them to turn over 20 times more land than a mule-pulled plough blade. And when the drought hit, there was that much more soil exposed to the winds.
Such technological advances undermined the long historical lessons farmers had learned about the effects of drought. Similarly, new chemical technologies were used in the DDT and Love Canal cases before their consequences could be understood. And for more than a century, the effects of emissions from fossil fuel-powered machinery had been dismissed as inconsequential.
In fact, without any historical records to base their assumptions, a generation of scientists expected the air and oceans could safely absorb the CO2 forever. Now they believe it’s contributing to rising planet temperatures and ocean acidification.
We have a cultural habit of trusting science to change and control the natural world, only to become skeptics when newer research warns of dangerous consequences. It might have been easy to downplay the significance of localized disasters, but with climate change it appears we’re ready to repeat those histories on a global scale.
The arctic is the world’s laboratory where stories of expanding moose habitat and shrinking polar ice can be read by anyone. There, we don’t need science to tell us what’s happening. The question we face is: Should we heed their warnings, or let the next generation write the scientific autopsy of our fossil-fueled civilization.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
