Why We All Need to Learn the Word "Anthropogenic"
Thursday, 30 July 2015 00:00 By Subhankar Banerjee, TomDispatch | Op-Ed
Washington's Olympic National Park, seen here in 2011, is home to the
wettest rainforest in the continental United States. That rainforest is
burning in what has been called the Paradise Fire. (Photo:
javi.velazquez/Flickr)
The wettest rainforest in the continental United States had gone up in
flames and the smoke was so thick, so blanketing, that you could see it
miles away. Deep in Washington's Olympic National Park, the aptly named
Paradise Fire, undaunted by the dampness of it all, was eating the forest
alive and destroying an ecological Eden. In this season of drought across
the West, there have been far bigger blazes but none quite so symbolic or
offering quite such grim news. It isn't the size of the fire (though it is
the largest in the park's history), nor its intensity. It's something else
entirely - the fact that it shouldn't have been burning at all. When fire
can eat a rainforest in a relatively cool climate, you know the Earth is
beginning to burn.
And here's the thing: the Olympic Peninsula is my home. Its destruction is
my personal nightmare and I couldn't stay away.
Smoke Gets in My Eyes
"What a bummer! Can't even see Mount Olympus," a disappointed tourist
exclaimed from the Hurricane Ridge visitor center. Still pointing his camera
at the hazy mountain-scape, he added that "on a sunny day like this" he
would ordinarily have gotten a "clear shot of the range." Indeed, on a good
day, that vantage point guarantees you a postcard-perfect view of the
Olympic Mountains and their glaciers, making Hurricane Ridge the most
visited location in the park, with the Hoh rainforest coming in a close
second. And a lot of people have taken photos there. With its more than
three million annual visitors, the park barely trails its two more famous
western cousins, Yosemite and Yellowstone, on the tourist circuit.
Days of rain had come the weekend before, soaking the rainforest without
staunching the Paradise Fire. The wetness did, however, help create those
massive clouds of smoke that wrecked the view miles away on that blazing hot
Sunday, July 19th. Though no fire was visible from the visitor center - it
was the old-growth rainforest of the Queets River Valley on the other side
of Mount Olympus that was burning - massive plumes of smoke were rising from
the Elwha River and Long Creek valleys.
By then, I felt as if smoke had become my companion. I had first encountered
it on another hot, sunny Sunday two weeks earlier.
On July 5th, I had gone to Hurricane Ridge with Finis Dunaway, historian of
environmental visual culture and author of Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse
of American Environmental Images. As this countryside is second nature to
me, I felt the shock and sadness the moment we piled out of the car. In a
season when the meadows and hills should have been lush green and carpeted
by wildflowers, they were rusty brown and bone-dry.
Normally, even when such meadows are still covered in snow, glacier lilies
still poke through. Avalanche lilies burst into riotous bloom as soon as the
snow melts, followed by lupines, paintbrushes, tiger lilies, and the Sitka
columbines, just to begin a list. Those meadows with their chorus of colors
are a wonder to photograph, but the flowers also provide much needed
nutrition to birds and animals, including the endemic Olympic marmots that
prefer, as the National Park Service puts it, "fresh, tender, flowering
plants such as lupine and glacier lilies."
Snow normally lingers on these subalpine meadows until the end of June or
early July, but last winter and spring were "anything but typical," as the
summer issue of the park's quarterly newspaper, the Bugler, pointed out.
January and February temperatures at the Hurricane Ridge station were "over
six degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average."
By late February, "less than three percent of normal" snowpack remained on
the Olympic Mountains and the meadows, normally still covered by more than
six feet of snow, "were bare." As the Bugler also noted, recent data and
scientific projections suggest that "this warming trend with less snowpack
is something the Pacific Northwest should get used to... What does this mean
for summer wildflowers, cold-water loving salmon, and myriad animals that
depend on a flush of summer vegetation watered by melting snow?" The answer,
unfortunately, isn't complicated: it spells disaster for the ecology of the
park.
Move on to the rainforest and the news is no less grim. This January, it got
14.07 inches of precipitation, which is 26% less than normal; February was
17% less; March was almost normal; and April was off by 23%. Worse yet, what
precipitation there was generally fell as rain, not snow, and the culprit
was those way-higher-than-average winter temperatures. Then the drought that
already had much of the West Coast in its grip arrived in the rainforest. In
May, precipitation fell to 75% less than normal and in June it was a
staggering 96% less than normal, historic lows for those months. The forest
floor dried up, as did the moss and lichens that hang in profusion from the
trees, creating kindling galore and priming the forest for potential
ignition by lightning.
That day, I was intent on showing Finis the spot along the Hurricane Hill
trail where, in 1997, I had taken a picture of a black-tailed deer. That
photo proved a turning point in my life, winning the Slide of the Year award
from the Boeing photography club and leading me eventually to give up the
security of a corporate career and start a conservation project in Alaska's
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
As it happened, it wouldn't be a day for nostalgia or for seeing much of
anything. On reaching Hurricane Hill, we found that the Olympic Mountains
were obscured by smoke from the Paradise Fire. Meanwhile, looking north
toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the Salish Sea, all that we could see
was an amber-lit deep haze. More smoke, in other words, coming from more
than 70 wildfires burning in British Columbia, Canada. As I write this,
there are 14 active wildfires in Washington and five in Oregon, while
British Columbia recently registered 185 of them.
So if you happen to live in the drought-stricken Southwest and are dreaming
of relocating to the cool, moist Pacific Northwest, think again. On the
Olympic Peninsula, it's haze to the horizon and the worst drought since
1895.
A Rainforest in a National Park
For visitors to the Olympic Peninsula, it seems obvious that a temperate
rainforest - itself a kind of natural wonder - should be in a national park.
As it happens, getting it included proved to be one of the most drawn-out
battles in American conservation history, which makes seeing it destroyed
all the more bitter.
Two centuries ago, expanses of coastal temperate rainforests stretched from
northern California to southern Alaska. Today, only about 4% of the
California redwoods remain, while in Oregon and Washington, the forests are
less than 10% of what they once were. Still, even in a degraded state, this
eco-region, including British Columbia and Alaska, contains more than a
quarter of the world's remaining coastal temperate rainforest.
In the era of climate change, this matters, because the Pacific coastal
rainforest is so productive that it has a much higher biomass than
comparable areas of any tropical rainforest. In translation: the Pacific
rainforests store an impressive amount of carbon in their wood and soil and
so contribute to keeping the climate cool. However, when that wood goes up
in flames, as it has recently, it releases the stored carbon into the
atmosphere at a rapid rate. The massive plumes of smoke we saw at Hurricane
Ridge offer visual testimony to a larger ecological disaster to come.
The old-growth rainforest that stretches across the western valleys of the
Olympic National Park is its crown jewel. As UNESCO wrote in recognizing the
park as a World Heritage Site, it includes "the best example of intact and
protected temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest." In those river
valleys, annual rainfall is measured not in inches but in feet, and it's the
wettest place in the continental United States. There you will find living
giants: a Sitka spruce more than 1,000 years old; Douglas fir more than 300
feet tall; mountain hemlock at 150 feet; yellow cedars that are nearly 12
feet in diameter; and a western red cedar whose circumference is more than
60 feet.
The rainforest is home to innumerable species, most of which remain hidden
from sight. Still, while walking its trails, you can sometimes hear the
bugle or get a glimpse of Roosevelt elk amid moss-draped, fog-shrouded
bigleaf maples. (The largest herd of wild elk in North America finds refuge
here.) And when you do, you'll know that you've entered a Tolkienesque
landscape. Those elk, by the way, were named in honor of President Theodore
Roosevelt who, in 1909, protected 615,000 acres of the peninsula, as Mount
Olympus National Monument.
Why not include a rainforest in a national park? That was the question being
asked at the turn of the twentieth century and Henry Graves, chief of the
U.S. Forest Service, answered it in definitive fashion this way: "It would
be great mistake to include in parks great bodies of commercial timber."
Despite the power of the timber industry and the Forest Service, however,
five committed citizens with few resources somehow managed to protect the
peninsula's last remaining rainforest. "They did it by involving the
public," environmentalist and former park ranger Carsten Lien writes in his
Olympic Battleground: Creating and Defending Olympic National Park. He adds,
"Preserving the environment through direct citizen activism, as we know it
today, had its beginnings in the Olympic National Park battle."
In 1938, the national monument was converted to Olympic National Park and a
significant amount of rainforest was included. As Lien would discover in
the late 1950s, however, the Park Service, despite its rhetoric of
stewardship, continued to let timber interests log there. Today, such
practices are long past, though commercial logging continues to play a
significant part in the economy of the peninsula in national, state, and
private forests.
A Fire That Just Won't Stop
Once the fire began, I just couldn't keep away. On a rainy July 10th, for
instance, listening to James Taylor's Fire and Rain, I drove toward the
Queets River Valley to learn more about the Paradise Fire so that I could
"talk about things to come."
At the Kalaloch campground, I asked the first park employee I ran into
whether the rain, then coming down harder, might extinguish the fire? "It
will slow down the fire's spread," she told me, "but won't put it out.
There's too much fuel in that valley."
The next morning, with the rain still falling steadily and the fire still
burning, I stood at the trailhead to the valley thinking about what another
park employee had told me. "The sad thing," she said, "is that the fire is
burning in the most primitive of the three river valleys." In other words, I
was standing mere miles away from the destruction of one of the most
primeval parts of the forest. As Queets was also one of the more difficult
locations to visit, less attention was being given to the fire than if, say,
it were in the always popular Hoh valley.
In a sense, the Paradise Fire has been burning out of sight of the general
public. Information about it has been coming from press releases and updates
prepared by the National Park Service. Though it is doing a good job of
sharing information, environmental disasters and their lessons often sink in
most deeply when they are observed and absorbed into collective memory via
the stories, fears, and hopes of ordinary citizens.
I had breakfast at the Kalaloch Lodge restaurant, not far from the Queets,
while the rain was still falling. "When will the sun come out?" an elderly
woman at the next table asked the waitress as if lodging a complaint with
management. "The whole weekend we've been here it's rained continuously."
"I'm so happy that finally we got three days of rain," the waitress
responded politely. "This year we got 12 inches. Usually we get about 12
feet. It's been bad for trees and all the life in our area." In fact, the
peninsula has received over 51 inches of rain, mostly last winter, but her
point couldn't have been more on target. "It has been so dry that the salmon
can't move in the river," she added. Her voice lit up a bit as she
continued, "With this rain, the rivers will rise and the salmon will be able
to go upriver to spawn. The salmon will return."
I asked where she was from. "Quinault Nation," she said, citing one of the
local native tribes dependent both nutritionally and culturally on those
salmon.
"The Queets, the largest river flowing off the west side of the Olympics, is
running at less than a third its normal volume," the Seattle Times reported.
"[B]ad news for the wild salmon runs, steelhead, bull trout, and cutthroat
trout." In addition to the disappearing snowpack and severe drought, the
iconic glaciers of the Olympic Mountains are melting rapidly, which will
likely someday spell doom for the park's rivers and its vibrant ecology.
According to Bill Baccus, a scientist at the park, over the last 30 years,
those glaciers have shrunk by about 35%, a direct consequence of the impact
of climate change.
After breakfast, I took off for the Hoh Valley. At its visitor center, a
ranger described the battle underway with the Paradise Fire. Summing up how
dire the situation was, he said, "Our goal is confinement, not containment."
Normally, success in fighting a wildfire is measured by what percentage of
it has been contained, but not with the Paradise. "Safety of the
firefighters and safety of the human communities are our two priorities
right now," the ranger explained. As a result, the National Park Service is
letting the fire burn further into wilderness areas unfought, while trying
to stop its spread toward human communities and into commercially valuable
timberlands outside the park.
For firefighters, combating such a blaze in an old-growth rainforest with
steep hills is, at best, an impossibly dangerous business. Large trees are
"falling down regularly," firefighter Dave Felsen told the Seattle Times.
"You can hear cracking and you try to move, but it's so thick in there that
there is no escape route if something is coming at you."
Besides, many of the traditional means of fighting wildfires don't work
against the Paradise. Dumping water from a helicopter, to take one example,
is almost meaningless. As an NPR reporter noted, the rainforest canopy "is
so dense that very little of the water will make it down to the fire burning
in the underbrush below." Worse yet, as the Washington Post reported, the
large trees and thick growth "make it impossible to effectively cut a fire
line" through the foliage to contain the spread of the flames.
With the moist lichens and mosses that usually give the rainforest its
magical appearance shriveled and dried out, they now help spread the fire
from tree to tree. When they burst into flames and fall to the ground, yet
more of the dry underbrush catches, too. In other words, that forest, which
normally would have suppressed a fire, has now been transformed into a
tinderbox.
"Few people in our profession have ever seen this kind of fire in this kind
of ecosystem," Bill Hahnenberg, the Paradise Fire incident commander, told
his crew. "The information you gather could be really valuable." He didn't
have to add the obvious: its value lies in offering hints as to how to fight
such fires in a future that, as the region becomes drier and hotter, will be
ever more amenable to them.
So far, the fire is smoldering, but as the summer heats up, the Seattle
Times reports, "there is still the potential for a crown fire that can
spread in dramatic fashion as treetops are engulfed in flames." According to
several park employees I spoke with, the Paradise Fire is likely to burn
until the autumn rains return to the western valleys. As of July 23rd, it
had eaten 1,781 acres, which sounds modest compared to other fires burning
in the West, but you have to remind yourself that it's not modest at all,
not in a temperate rainforest. It also poses a challenge to the very
American idea of land conservation.
Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American
environmentalists passionately fought to protect large swaths of public
lands and waters. The national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, and
wildernesses they helped to create laid the basis for a new American
identity. Nationalism aside, such publicly protected lands and waters also
offered refuge for an incredible diversity of species, some of which would
have otherwise found it difficult to survive at the edges of an expanding
industrialized, consumerist society. Today, that diversity of life within
these public lands and waters is increasingly endangered by climate change.
What, then, should environmental conservation look like in a twenty-first
century in which the Paradise Fire could become something like the norm?
Tankers and Rigs
"This is not an anthropogenic fire," the ranger I spoke with at the Hoh
visitor center insisted. In the most literal sense, that's true. In late
May, lightning struck a tree in the Queets Valley and started the fire,
which then smoldered and slowly spread across the north bank of the river.
It was finally detected in mid-June and firefighters were called in. That
such a lightning strike disqualifies the Paradise Fire from being
"anthropogenic" - human-caused - would once have been a given, but in a
world being heated by the burning of fossil fuels, such definitions have to
be reconsidered.
The very rarity of such fires speaks to the anthropogenic nature of the
origins of this one. After all, a temperate rainforest as a vast collection
of biomass and so a carbon sink is only possible thanks to the rarity of
fire in such a habitat. According to the World Wildlife Fund, "With a unique
combination of moderate temperatures and very high rainfall, the climate
makes fires extremely rare" in such forests.
The natural fire cycle in these forests is about 500 to 800 years. In other
words, once every half-millennium or more this forest may experience a
moderate-sized fire. But that's now changing. Mark Huff, who has been
studying wildfires in the park since the late 1970s, told Seattle's public
radio station KUOW that in the past half-century there have already been
"three modest-sized fires" here, including the Paradise, though the other
two were less destructive.According to a National Park Service map ("Olympic
National Park: Fire History 1896-2006") in the western rainforest, during
that century-plus, two lightning-caused fires burned more than 100 acres and
another more than 500 acres.
If, however, fires in the rainforest become the new normal, comments Olympic
National Park wildlife biologist Patti Happe, "then we may not have these
forests."
A team of international climate change and rainforest experts published a
study earlier this year warning that, "without drastic and immediate cuts to
greenhouse gas emissions and new forest protections, the world's most
expansive stretch of temperate rainforests from Alaska to the coast redwoods
will experience irreparable losses." In fact, says the study's lead author,
Dominick DellaSala, "In the Pacific Northwest... the climate may no longer
support rainforest communities."
Speaking of the anthropogenic, on our way back, Finis and I stopped in Port
Angeles, the largest city on the peninsula. There we noted a Chevron oil
tanker, the massive 904-foot Pegasus Voyager, moored in its harbor on the
Salish Sea. It had arrived empty for "topside repair." Today, only a modest
number of oil tankers and barges come here for repair, refueling, and other
services, but that could change dramatically if Canada's tar sands
extraction project really takes off and vast quantities of that particularly
carbon-dirty energy product are exported to Asia.
That industry is already fighting to build two new pipelines from Alberta,
the source of most of the country's tar sands, to the coast of British
Columbia. "Once this invasion of tar sands oil reaches the coast," a Natural
Resources Defense Council press release states, "up to 2,000 additional
barges and tankers would be needed to carry the crude to Washington and
California ports and international markets across the Pacific." All of those
barges and tankers would be moving through the Salish Sea and along
Washington's coast.
And let's not forget that, in May, Shell Oil moored in Seattle's harbor the
Polar Pioneer, one of the two rigs the company plans to use this summer for
exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea of Arctic Alaska (a project only
recently green-lighted by the Obama administration). In fact, Shell expects
to use that harbor as the staging area for its Arctic drilling fleet. The
arrival of Polar Pioneer inspired a "kayaktivist" campaign, which received
national and international media coverage. It focused on drawing attention
to the dangers of drilling in the melting Arctic Ocean, including the
significant contribution such new energy extraction projects could make to
climate change.
In other words, two of the most potentially climate-destroying
fossil-fuel-extraction projects on Earth more or less bookend the burning
Olympic Peninsula.
The harbors of Washington, a state that prides itself on its environmental
stewardship, have already become a support base for one, and the other will
likely join the crowd in the years to come. Washington's residents will
gradually become more accustomed to oil rigs and tankers and trains, while
its rainforests burn in yet more paradisical fires.
In the meantime, the Olympic Peninsula is still wreathed in smoke, the West
is still drought central, and anthropogenic is a word all of us had better
learn soon.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the
latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
SUBHANKAR BANERJEE
Subhankar Banerjee's most recent book is Arctic Voices: Resistance at the
Tipping Point. His Arctic photographs are currently on display in two
exhibitions at the Nottingham Contemporary in the United Kingdom and at the
McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario, Canada. He has been deeply
involved with the native tribes of the Arctic in trying to prevent the
destruction of Arctic lands and seas.
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By Juan González, Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
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Why We All Need to Learn the Word "Anthropogenic"
Thursday, 30 July 2015 00:00 By Subhankar Banerjee, TomDispatch | Op-Ed
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Washington's Olympic National Park, seen here in 2011, is home to
the wettest rainforest in the continental United States. That rainforest is
burning in what has been called the Paradise Fire. (Photo:
javi.velazquez/Flickr)
The wettest rainforest in the continental United States had gone up
in flames and the smoke was so thick, so blanketing, that you could see it
miles away. Deep in Washington's Olympic National Park, the aptly named
Paradise Fire, undaunted by the dampness of it all, was eating the forest
alive and destroying an ecological Eden. In this season of drought across
the West, there have been far bigger blazes but none quite so symbolic or
offering quite such grim news. It isn't the size of the fire (though it is
the largest in the park's history), nor its intensity. It's something else
entirely - the fact that it shouldn't have been burning at all. When fire
can eat a rainforest in a relatively cool climate, you know the Earth is
beginning to burn.
And here's the thing: the Olympic Peninsula is my home. Its destruction is
my personal nightmare and I couldn't stay away.
Smoke Gets in My Eyes
"What a bummer! Can't even see Mount Olympus," a disappointed tourist
exclaimed from the Hurricane Ridge visitor center. Still pointing his camera
at the hazy mountain-scape, he added that "on a sunny day like this" he
would ordinarily have gotten a "clear shot of the range." Indeed, on a good
day, that vantage point guarantees you a postcard-perfect view of the
Olympic Mountains and their glaciers, making Hurricane Ridge the most
visited location in the park, with the Hoh rainforest coming in a close
second. And a lot of people have taken photos there. With its more than
three million annual visitors, the park barely trails its two more famous
western cousins, Yosemite and Yellowstone, on the tourist circuit.
Days of rain had come the weekend before, soaking the rainforest without
staunching the Paradise Fire. The wetness did, however, help create those
massive clouds of smoke that wrecked the view miles away on that blazing hot
Sunday, July 19th. Though no fire was visible from the visitor center - it
was the old-growth rainforest of the Queets River Valley on the other side
of Mount Olympus that was burning - massive plumes of smoke were rising from
the Elwha River and Long Creek valleys.
By then, I felt as if smoke had become my companion. I had first encountered
it on another hot, sunny Sunday two weeks earlier.
On July 5th, I had gone to Hurricane Ridge with Finis Dunaway, historian of
environmental visual culture and author of Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse
of American Environmental Images. As this countryside is second nature to
me, I felt the shock and sadness the moment we piled out of the car. In a
season when the meadows and hills should have been lush green and carpeted
by wildflowers, they were rusty brown and bone-dry.
Normally, even when such meadows are still covered in snow, glacier lilies
still poke through. Avalanche lilies burst into riotous bloom as soon as the
snow melts, followed by lupines, paintbrushes, tiger lilies, and the Sitka
columbines, just to begin a list. Those meadows with their chorus of colors
are a wonder to photograph, but the flowers also provide much needed
nutrition to birds and animals, including the endemic Olympic marmots that
prefer, as the National Park Service puts it, "fresh, tender, flowering
plants such as lupine and glacier lilies."
Snow normally lingers on these subalpine meadows until the end of June or
early July, but last winter and spring were "anything but typical," as the
summer issue of the park's quarterly newspaper, the Bugler, pointed out.
January and February temperatures at the Hurricane Ridge station were "over
six degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average."
By late February, "less than three percent of normal" snowpack remained on
the Olympic Mountains and the meadows, normally still covered by more than
six feet of snow, "were bare." As the Bugler also noted, recent data and
scientific projections suggest that "this warming trend with less snowpack
is something the Pacific Northwest should get used to... What does this mean
for summer wildflowers, cold-water loving salmon, and myriad animals that
depend on a flush of summer vegetation watered by melting snow?" The answer,
unfortunately, isn't complicated: it spells disaster for the ecology of the
park.
Move on to the rainforest and the news is no less grim. This January, it got
14.07 inches of precipitation, which is 26% less than normal; February was
17% less; March was almost normal; and April was off by 23%. Worse yet, what
precipitation there was generally fell as rain, not snow, and the culprit
was those way-higher-than-average winter temperatures. Then the drought that
already had much of the West Coast in its grip arrived in the rainforest. In
May, precipitation fell to 75% less than normal and in June it was a
staggering 96% less than normal, historic lows for those months. The forest
floor dried up, as did the moss and lichens that hang in profusion from the
trees, creating kindling galore and priming the forest for potential
ignition by lightning.
That day, I was intent on showing Finis the spot along the Hurricane Hill
trail where, in 1997, I had taken a picture of a black-tailed deer. That
photo proved a turning point in my life, winning the Slide of the Year award
from the Boeing photography club and leading me eventually to give up the
security of a corporate career and start a conservation project in Alaska's
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
As it happened, it wouldn't be a day for nostalgia or for seeing much of
anything. On reaching Hurricane Hill, we found that the Olympic Mountains
were obscured by smoke from the Paradise Fire. Meanwhile, looking north
toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the Salish Sea, all that we could see
was an amber-lit deep haze. More smoke, in other words, coming from more
than 70 wildfires burning in British Columbia, Canada. As I write this,
there are 14 active wildfires in Washington and five in Oregon, while
British Columbia recently registered 185 of them.
So if you happen to live in the drought-stricken Southwest and are dreaming
of relocating to the cool, moist Pacific Northwest, think again. On the
Olympic Peninsula, it's haze to the horizon and the worst drought since
1895.
A Rainforest in a National Park
For visitors to the Olympic Peninsula, it seems obvious that a temperate
rainforest - itself a kind of natural wonder - should be in a national park.
As it happens, getting it included proved to be one of the most drawn-out
battles in American conservation history, which makes seeing it destroyed
all the more bitter.
Two centuries ago, expanses of coastal temperate rainforests stretched from
northern California to southern Alaska. Today, only about 4% of the
California redwoods remain, while in Oregon and Washington, the forests are
less than 10% of what they once were. Still, even in a degraded state, this
eco-region, including British Columbia and Alaska, contains more than a
quarter of the world's remaining coastal temperate rainforest.
In the era of climate change, this matters, because the Pacific coastal
rainforest is so productive that it has a much higher biomass than
comparable areas of any tropical rainforest. In translation: the Pacific
rainforests store an impressive amount of carbon in their wood and soil and
so contribute to keeping the climate cool. However, when that wood goes up
in flames, as it has recently, it releases the stored carbon into the
atmosphere at a rapid rate. The massive plumes of smoke we saw at Hurricane
Ridge offer visual testimony to a larger ecological disaster to come.
The old-growth rainforest that stretches across the western valleys of the
Olympic National Park is its crown jewel. As UNESCO wrote in recognizing the
park as a World Heritage Site, it includes "the best example of intact and
protected temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest." In those river
valleys, annual rainfall is measured not in inches but in feet, and it's the
wettest place in the continental United States. There you will find living
giants: a Sitka spruce more than 1,000 years old; Douglas fir more than 300
feet tall; mountain hemlock at 150 feet; yellow cedars that are nearly 12
feet in diameter; and a western red cedar whose circumference is more than
60 feet.
The rainforest is home to innumerable species, most of which remain hidden
from sight. Still, while walking its trails, you can sometimes hear the
bugle or get a glimpse of Roosevelt elk amid moss-draped, fog-shrouded
bigleaf maples. (The largest herd of wild elk in North America finds refuge
here.) And when you do, you'll know that you've entered a Tolkienesque
landscape. Those elk, by the way, were named in honor of President Theodore
Roosevelt who, in 1909, protected 615,000 acres of the peninsula, as Mount
Olympus National Monument.
Why not include a rainforest in a national park? That was the question being
asked at the turn of the twentieth century and Henry Graves, chief of the
U.S. Forest Service, answered it in definitive fashion this way: "It would
be great mistake to include in parks great bodies of commercial timber."
Despite the power of the timber industry and the Forest Service, however,
five committed citizens with few resources somehow managed to protect the
peninsula's last remaining rainforest. "They did it by involving the
public," environmentalist and former park ranger Carsten Lien writes in his
Olympic Battleground: Creating and Defending Olympic National Park. He adds,
"Preserving the environment through direct citizen activism, as we know it
today, had its beginnings in the Olympic National Park battle."
In 1938, the national monument was converted to Olympic National Park and a
significant amount of rainforest was included. As Lien would discover in the
late 1950s, however, the Park Service, despite its rhetoric of stewardship,
continued to let timber interests log there. Today, such practices are long
past, though commercial logging continues to play a significant part in the
economy of the peninsula in national, state, and private forests.
A Fire That Just Won't Stop
Once the fire began, I just couldn't keep away. On a rainy July 10th, for
instance, listening to James Taylor's Fire and Rain, I drove toward the
Queets River Valley to learn more about the Paradise Fire so that I could
"talk about things to come."
At the Kalaloch campground, I asked the first park employee I ran into
whether the rain, then coming down harder, might extinguish the fire? "It
will slow down the fire's spread," she told me, "but won't put it out.
There's too much fuel in that valley."
The next morning, with the rain still falling steadily and the fire still
burning, I stood at the trailhead to the valley thinking about what another
park employee had told me. "The sad thing," she said, "is that the fire is
burning in the most primitive of the three river valleys." In other words, I
was standing mere miles away from the destruction of one of the most
primeval parts of the forest. As Queets was also one of the more difficult
locations to visit, less attention was being given to the fire than if, say,
it were in the always popular Hoh valley.
In a sense, the Paradise Fire has been burning out of sight of the general
public. Information about it has been coming from press releases and updates
prepared by the National Park Service. Though it is doing a good job of
sharing information, environmental disasters and their lessons often sink in
most deeply when they are observed and absorbed into collective memory via
the stories, fears, and hopes of ordinary citizens.
I had breakfast at the Kalaloch Lodge restaurant, not far from the Queets,
while the rain was still falling. "When will the sun come out?" an elderly
woman at the next table asked the waitress as if lodging a complaint with
management. "The whole weekend we've been here it's rained continuously."
"I'm so happy that finally we got three days of rain," the waitress
responded politely. "This year we got 12 inches. Usually we get about 12
feet. It's been bad for trees and all the life in our area." In fact, the
peninsula has received over 51 inches of rain, mostly last winter, but her
point couldn't have been more on target. "It has been so dry that the salmon
can't move in the river," she added. Her voice lit up a bit as she
continued, "With this rain, the rivers will rise and the salmon will be able
to go upriver to spawn. The salmon will return."
I asked where she was from. "Quinault Nation," she said, citing one of the
local native tribes dependent both nutritionally and culturally on those
salmon.
"The Queets, the largest river flowing off the west side of the Olympics, is
running at less than a third its normal volume," the Seattle Times reported.
"[B]ad news for the wild salmon runs, steelhead, bull trout, and cutthroat
trout." In addition to the disappearing snowpack and severe drought, the
iconic glaciers of the Olympic Mountains are melting rapidly, which will
likely someday spell doom for the park's rivers and its vibrant ecology.
According to Bill Baccus, a scientist at the park, over the last 30 years,
those glaciers have shrunk by about 35%, a direct consequence of the impact
of climate change.
After breakfast, I took off for the Hoh Valley. At its visitor center, a
ranger described the battle underway with the Paradise Fire. Summing up how
dire the situation was, he said, "Our goal is confinement, not containment."
Normally, success in fighting a wildfire is measured by what percentage of
it has been contained, but not with the Paradise. "Safety of the
firefighters and safety of the human communities are our two priorities
right now," the ranger explained. As a result, the National Park Service is
letting the fire burn further into wilderness areas unfought, while trying
to stop its spread toward human communities and into commercially valuable
timberlands outside the park.
For firefighters, combating such a blaze in an old-growth rainforest with
steep hills is, at best, an impossibly dangerous business. Large trees are
"falling down regularly," firefighter Dave Felsen told the Seattle Times.
"You can hear cracking and you try to move, but it's so thick in there that
there is no escape route if something is coming at you."
Besides, many of the traditional means of fighting wildfires don't work
against the Paradise. Dumping water from a helicopter, to take one example,
is almost meaningless. As an NPR reporter noted, the rainforest canopy "is
so dense that very little of the water will make it down to the fire burning
in the underbrush below." Worse yet, as the Washington Post reported, the
large trees and thick growth "make it impossible to effectively cut a fire
line" through the foliage to contain the spread of the flames.
With the moist lichens and mosses that usually give the rainforest its
magical appearance shriveled and dried out, they now help spread the fire
from tree to tree. When they burst into flames and fall to the ground, yet
more of the dry underbrush catches, too. In other words, that forest, which
normally would have suppressed a fire, has now been transformed into a
tinderbox.
"Few people in our profession have ever seen this kind of fire in this kind
of ecosystem," Bill Hahnenberg, the Paradise Fire incident commander, told
his crew. "The information you gather could be really valuable." He didn't
have to add the obvious: its value lies in offering hints as to how to fight
such fires in a future that, as the region becomes drier and hotter, will be
ever more amenable to them.
So far, the fire is smoldering, but as the summer heats up, the Seattle
Times reports, "there is still the potential for a crown fire that can
spread in dramatic fashion as treetops are engulfed in flames." According to
several park employees I spoke with, the Paradise Fire is likely to burn
until the autumn rains return to the western valleys. As of July 23rd, it
had eaten 1,781 acres, which sounds modest compared to other fires burning
in the West, but you have to remind yourself that it's not modest at all,
not in a temperate rainforest. It also poses a challenge to the very
American idea of land conservation.
Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American
environmentalists passionately fought to protect large swaths of public
lands and waters. The national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, and
wildernesses they helped to create laid the basis for a new American
identity. Nationalism aside, such publicly protected lands and waters also
offered refuge for an incredible diversity of species, some of which would
have otherwise found it difficult to survive at the edges of an expanding
industrialized, consumerist society. Today, that diversity of life within
these public lands and waters is increasingly endangered by climate change.
What, then, should environmental conservation look like in a twenty-first
century in which the Paradise Fire could become something like the norm?
Tankers and Rigs
"This is not an anthropogenic fire," the ranger I spoke with at the Hoh
visitor center insisted. In the most literal sense, that's true. In late
May, lightning struck a tree in the Queets Valley and started the fire,
which then smoldered and slowly spread across the north bank of the river.
It was finally detected in mid-June and firefighters were called in. That
such a lightning strike disqualifies the Paradise Fire from being
"anthropogenic" - human-caused - would once have been a given, but in a
world being heated by the burning of fossil fuels, such definitions have to
be reconsidered.
The very rarity of such fires speaks to the anthropogenic nature of the
origins of this one. After all, a temperate rainforest as a vast collection
of biomass and so a carbon sink is only possible thanks to the rarity of
fire in such a habitat. According to the World Wildlife Fund, "With a unique
combination of moderate temperatures and very high rainfall, the climate
makes fires extremely rare" in such forests.
The natural fire cycle in these forests is about 500 to 800 years. In other
words, once every half-millennium or more this forest may experience a
moderate-sized fire. But that's now changing. Mark Huff, who has been
studying wildfires in the park since the late 1970s, told Seattle's public
radio station KUOW that in the past half-century there have already been
"three modest-sized fires" here, including the Paradise, though the other
two were less destructive.According to a National Park Service map ("Olympic
National Park: Fire History 1896-2006") in the western rainforest, during
that century-plus, two lightning-caused fires burned more than 100 acres and
another more than 500 acres.
If, however, fires in the rainforest become the new normal, comments Olympic
National Park wildlife biologist Patti Happe, "then we may not have these
forests."
A team of international climate change and rainforest experts published a
study earlier this year warning that, "without drastic and immediate cuts to
greenhouse gas emissions and new forest protections, the world's most
expansive stretch of temperate rainforests from Alaska to the coast redwoods
will experience irreparable losses." In fact, says the study's lead author,
Dominick DellaSala, "In the Pacific Northwest... the climate may no longer
support rainforest communities."
Speaking of the anthropogenic, on our way back, Finis and I stopped in Port
Angeles, the largest city on the peninsula. There we noted a Chevron oil
tanker, the massive 904-foot Pegasus Voyager, moored in its harbor on the
Salish Sea. It had arrived empty for "topside repair." Today, only a modest
number of oil tankers and barges come here for repair, refueling, and other
services, but that could change dramatically if Canada's tar sands
extraction project really takes off and vast quantities of that particularly
carbon-dirty energy product are exported to Asia.
That industry is already fighting to build two new pipelines from Alberta,
the source of most of the country's tar sands, to the coast of British
Columbia. "Once this invasion of tar sands oil reaches the coast," a Natural
Resources Defense Council press release states, "up to 2,000 additional
barges and tankers would be needed to carry the crude to Washington and
California ports and international markets across the Pacific." All of those
barges and tankers would be moving through the Salish Sea and along
Washington's coast.
And let's not forget that, in May, Shell Oil moored in Seattle's harbor the
Polar Pioneer, one of the two rigs the company plans to use this summer for
exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea of Arctic Alaska (a project only
recently green-lighted by the Obama administration). In fact, Shell expects
to use that harbor as the staging area for its Arctic drilling fleet. The
arrival of Polar Pioneer inspired a "kayaktivist" campaign, which received
national and international media coverage. It focused on drawing attention
to the dangers of drilling in the melting Arctic Ocean, including the
significant contribution such new energy extraction projects could make to
climate change.
In other words, two of the most potentially climate-destroying
fossil-fuel-extraction projects on Earth more or less bookend the burning
Olympic Peninsula.
The harbors of Washington, a state that prides itself on its environmental
stewardship, have already become a support base for one, and the other will
likely join the crowd in the years to come. Washington's residents will
gradually become more accustomed to oil rigs and tankers and trains, while
its rainforests burn in yet more paradisical fires.
In the meantime, the Olympic Peninsula is still wreathed in smoke, the West
is still drought central, and anthropogenic is a word all of us had better
learn soon.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the
latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Subhankar Banerjee
Subhankar Banerjee's most recent book is Arctic Voices: Resistance at the
Tipping Point. His Arctic photographs are currently on display in two
exhibitions at the Nottingham Contemporary in the United Kingdom and at the
McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario, Canada. He has been deeply
involved with the native tribes of the Arctic in trying to prevent the
destruction of Arctic lands and seas.
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