Dr. Earle began her talk charging us to compare earth to Mars. They are sister planets, but have
taken very different paths with earth becoming the blue and green gem that it is today and Mars a giant cold desert. Dr.Earle told us that “We have thought about “terriforming Mars, but in some places we are doing a good job at “marsifying earth”.
A generation ago we could never have imagined that we have the power to actually alter the life support systems of our planet at a global scale, but now the concepts of human-induced climate change and ocean acidification and global impacts of fish populations due to over-harvesting are not abstract hypotheses, but rather factors that those of us who work on the ground must think about in managing fish and wildlife habitat.
The effects of climate change that I worry most about in the short term as a Friend of the Conte and McKinney Refuges are simple and these effects are already manifesting themselves. Rising sea levels are already impacting the specialized wildlife that depend on the tidal marshes of the Connecticut River-Long Island Sound
ecosystem. Saltmarsh Sparrows for example, return to our marshes every May and nest in the high areas of the
marsh. They nest immediately upon their return and invariably lose their first nests to the next spring tide and then race to nest again and raise their young before the next inundation. Any shortening of that inter-tidal cycle,
even by a couple of days can mean the difference between reproduction and returning to the wintering areas having produced no young. Researchers from the University of Connecticut have shown that these small birds are already suffering from very low nesting success due to the effects of increased tidal flooding. For someone who is charged with conserving Connecticut’s birds, the impacts of climate change are not abstract or something we need to plan for in the future. They are something that must be taken into account if we hope to maintain our biological diversity now, not in future generations.
Earth’s systems are complicated and interconnected and can not be summed up in straw man catch phrases.
We, as a part of this global ecosystem, must conserve the systems that sustain the planet and us. We must conserve the blue and green infrastructure that make our planet the wonder that it is. To quote Dr. Earle “do you like to breathe, do you care about the water that magically falls from the sky…All of us are sea creatures”, after all it is the blue planet.
While this may sound depressing, I never underestimate the power of human ingenuity. As my father,
who was born in 1930, huddled around the latest technology of his time, listening to the evening radio shows, could he have ever envisioned a vast interconnected web could allow us to watch live streaming video of a conference in Wisconsin via a hand-held phone, or carry around the equivalent of several Encyclopedia Britannicas in our pocket every day on a phone or mobile device. If our society puts our collective minds to solutions for these complex problems, I have confidence that we can find solutions that we can’t even imagine today. The Refuge System’s draft vision document is a great start, by charging the Service to look beyond the boundaries and impact ecosystems and species at the population level charges us all to think of how we too can think beyond our boundaries.
Patrick Comins,
Director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut, the state
office of the National Audubon Society and chairman of the Friends of The
Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Service.
