• Big game: Across the continent, deer, elk and other big game populations will shrink as high levels of greenhouse gases make the plants they eat less nourishing and tougher to digest. • Freshwater fish: Nationally, up to 42 percent of current trout and salmon habitat will be lost before the end of the century and the South is one of the regions that will experience especially severe reductions. In lower elevations of the Appalachian Mountains, as much as 97 percent of the wild trout population could die. While better able than trout to adapt to increased water temperatures, bass, bluegill and other warm-water species will face other threats from global warming. For example, changes in precipitation patterns--heavy, flood-producing rains interspersed with extended droughts--will cause major fluctuations in water levels, dramatically reducing the survival rate of eggs, larvae and fry. • Waterfowl: Hunters from the Dakotas to Louisiana, from California to Virginia are reporting that migrations are occurring later in the season--and in some instances, not occurring at all. The Chenier Plain marshes of Louisiana, supporting over 1.3 million waterfowl today, could eventually support as little as one percent of that number. (A hard copy of the report is available by contacting the Bipartisan Policy Center, 1225 I Street N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005. Phone: 202.204.2400) If climate change is likely to fall hard on game species, songbirds and others, it may be a boon to less welcome species --pests, if you will. The following section looks at the ravages of the hemlock woolly adelgid. Cold winters, which tend to knock back the adelgid and other insect pests, will be less a factor, probably allowing adelgids to sustain voracious populations that normal winters historically have constrained. And as temperate zones swing farther and farther north, the range of such pests will expand. Invasive plants are gaining new footholds, native plants struggling. Wildlife that depend on these habitats are under increasing stress as urban sprawl, energy development in some parts of the country and motorized recreation nearly everywhere encroach on the very habitats set aside to protect wildlife.
What Does All of This Have To Do With Wilderness and Forest Management? Every natural system, including wilderness, is vulnerable to climate change. Greg Aplet, senior forest scientist for The Wilderness Society, and other scientists are unequivocal on that point. Yet Aplet believes that wilderness protection is a crucial part of a strategy to address climate change and he cites two reasons: •
First, climate change represents yet one more stress,
Eastern hemlock
photo by Lamar Marshall North Carolina’s Mountain Treasures
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