How the Sierras Aged by jessica-berge

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A Timeline of

Select Art and Writings How the Sierras Aged

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How the Sierras Aged

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A Timeline of Select Art and Writings

How the Sierras Aged

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The Sierra Club Seal is a registered copyright, service mark, and trademark of the Sierra Club.

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Sierra Nevada Snow Won’t End California’s Thirst 2016

Bird Conservation in the Sierra 2013

Ansel Adams— The Last Interview 1984

Storyline of Mountain Days: The John Muir Musical 2000

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Environmentalism’s Racist History 2015

Table of Contents

Yosemite Valley Floor Map 1890

John Muir Wilderness Map 1964

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Warming winters and dwindling Sierra Nevada snowpack will squeeze water resources in parts of California 2018

Study Finds Snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada to Be Lowest in 500 Years 2015

Ansel

Ansel Adams

Wilderness Map 1964

Trout as Colorful as Mountain Backdrop 2007

Bighorn Sheep Losing Ground, and Lives, to Old Foes1 1998

Adams Photography 1922 Yosemite Map 1890 Editorial Letter::The Yosemite 1912

This map is from the Biennial Report of the Commissioners, 1887-88. The commissioners also at that time issued some important policy statements. Their aim was to preserve the valley floor as nearly as possible in its natural state by avoiding the grouping of buildings in a “village” effect, by reducing the number of permanent residents in the valley to the lowest number required for guarding public property in the winter, by expelling from, the valley all “tradesmen, trinket and curiosity peddlers, hawkers, solicitors, and similar nuisances who prey upon visitors,” and by restoring the park-like character of the valley according to forestery principles. The board also reported that Congress was already acting on its request to add the Yosemite watershed to the reservation in order to safeguard its forests and prevent diversion of its streams.

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ValleyYosemiteMap

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1890 Yosemite National Park

Yosemite Map

Muir’s writing and his own personal passion for Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada helped spur a national conservation movement. Muir even escorted groups of influential people on guided trips into Yosemite and the surrounding Sierra Nevada to expound upon the importance of preserving nature. On one trip to Tuolumne Meadows, Muir together with Robert Underwood, editor the Century Magazine, came up with the idea to launch a campaign to make Yosemite a national park.

Their dream came true in 1890, when the land around Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias became part of Yosemite National Park. Congress also authorized the creation of Sequoia National Park and General Grant National Park (now part of Kings Canyon National Park) to preserve the giant sequoia forests found farther in the Sierra Nevada. The U.S Cavalry assumed jurisdiction of the new national park lands (learn more about the buffalo soldiers who served in the Sierra Nevada here).

John Muir wanted to spread the word about the destruction of Yosemite’s ecosystem that he was witnessing. Despite the park’s protected status, he saw meadows being devastated by grazing livestock (which he called “hooved locusts”), especially in the high country. He also saw widespread deforestation caused by timber logging operations.

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A map of the proposed National Park with annotations from John Muir. Green is the original 1864 Yosemite Grant, pink shows the watershed of the Yosemite streams, and blue shows the proposed boundary of the Yosemite National Park.

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Muir continued to campaign for protection of wilderness in the Sierra Nevada for the rest of his life, although he lost the fight to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley, in the northwestern corner of Yosemite National Park, from being dammed.

But exploitation of the new national park’s resources was still rampant, and the Yosemite Valley itself was still under state control. When Muir took President Theodore Roosevelt on a camping trip in Yosemite in 1903, he was able to convince the president of the importance of preserving more of the Sierra Nevada as federal land. Yosemite National Park as we know it today took shape in 1906, when Roosevelt took back control of Yosemite Valley from the state of California and protected the entire region as Yosemite National Park.

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This image was taken from 1910-1920 by Myrtle S. Ford.

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In 1914, ther was the last Sierra Club outing to Hetch Hetchy Valley. John Muir dies on December 24. The Sierra Club wins passage of California legislation appropriating $10,000 for construction of the John Muir Trail, the first of five such appropriations in 1915. Joseph LeConte, Jr., becomes Club’s second President. In 1919, Ansel Adams becomes custodian of LeConte Lodge in Yosemite Valley. Club supports formation of Save-the-Redwoods League.

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This image was taken from 1910-1920 by Myrtle S. Ford.

Editorial Letter: The Yosemite John Muir 1922

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Editorial Letter: The Yosemite 1912

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John Muir

1912 Editorial Letter: The Yosemite

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When I set out on the long excursion that finally led to California I wandered afoot and alone, from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, with a plant-press on my back, holding a generally southward course, like the birds when they are going from summer to winter. From the west coast of Florida I crossed the gulf to Cuba, enjoyed the rich tropical flora there for a few months, intending to go thence to the north end of South America, make my way through the woods to the headwaters of the Amazon, and float down that grand river to the ocean. But I was unable to find a ship bound for South America—fortunately perhaps, for I had incredibly little money for so long a trip and had not yet fully recov ered from a fever caught in the Florida swamps. Therefore I decided to visit California for a year or two to see its wonderful flora and the famous Yosemite Valley. All the world was before me and every day was a holiday, so it did not seem important to which one of the world’s wildernesses I first should wander. Arriving by the Panama steamer, I stopped one day in San Francisco and then inquired for the nearest way out of town. “But where do you want to go?” asked the man to whom I had applied for this important information. “To any place that is wild,” I said. This reply startled him. He seemed to fear I might be

John Muir

crazy and therefore the sooner I was out of town the better, so he directed me to the Oakland ferry. So on the first of April, 1868, I set out afoot for Yosemite. It was the bloom-time of the year over the lowlands and coast ranges the landscapes of the Santa Clara Valley were fairly drenched with sunshine, all the air was quivering with the songs of the meadow-larks, and the hills were so covered with flowers that they seemed to be painted. Slow indeed was my progress through these glorious gardens, the first of the California flora I had seen. Cattle and cultivation were making few scars as yet, and I wandered enchanted in long wavering curves, knowing by my pocket map that Yosemite Valley lay to the east and that I should surely find it.

The Sierra From The West Looking eastward from the summit of the Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositœ. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not

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In general views no mark of man is visible upon it, nor any thing to suggest the wonderful depth and grandeur of its sculpture. None of its magnificent forest-crowned ridges seems to rise mud above the general level to publish its wealth. No great valley or river is seen, or group of well-marked features of any kind standing out as distinct pictures. Even the summit peaks, marshaled in glorious array so high in the sky, seem comparatively regular in form. Nevertheless the whole range five hundred miles long is furrowed with cañons 2000 to 5000 feet deep, in which once flowed majestic glaciers, and in which now flow and sing the bright rejoicing rivers.

clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; below it a belt of blue and lark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching long the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple; all these colors, from the blue sky to the yellow valley smoothly blending as they do in a rainbow, making a wall of light ineffably fine. Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

1912 Editorial Letter: The Yosemite

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John Muir

John Muir 1838-1914

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1927 was the pivotal year of Ansel Adams’s life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influ ence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams’ first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Bender’s friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support changed Adams’s life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confi dence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender’s benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), “did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer’s epics did for Odysseus.”

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Ansel Adams the Face of Half Dome

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Ansel Adams Photography William Turnage 1922

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Ansel PhotographyAdams: 1922-1984

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William Turnage

For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual— emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service’s “resortism,” which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domina tion by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy. Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d’etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, “I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)” Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of “humanity” in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that “the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees” (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On

Ansel Adams: Photography

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1922-1984

William Turnage

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the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues.

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On annual High Trip in 1931, Sierra Club members Francis Farqua har and Robert Underhill introduce the use of rope and belaying techniques in rock climbing. They later lead first ascents on North Palisade, Thunderbolt Park, and east face of Mt. Whitney. In 1936, Ansel Adams travels with his photographs to Washington, D.C., to lobby the Roosevelt administration to preserve Kings Canyon and the surrounding High Sierra.

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Cathedral Peak and Lake by Ansel Adams in 1938.

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In 1942, the Sierra Club contributes $2,500 toward Park Service acquisition of privately owned property on Tenaya Lake in Yo semite National Park. In 1943, Ansel photographed lands being farmed that eventually will help contribute to the lack of water in the Sierras.

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Workers in fields by ANsel Adams in 1943.

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In 1954, the Sierra Club’s Outing Committee organizes the first service trips in which hikers work on trail maintenance and back country management projects.

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Half Dome Thundercloud in 1956 by Ansel Adams

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In 1964, after years of battle, Congress passes the Wilderness Act, the first wilderness protection legislation in the world. Congress also creates the Land and Water Conservation Fund and pro vides for review of public land laws. Club advocates establish ment of Redwood National Park and asks California Governor Pat Brown to complete acquisition of state redwood parks.

Ansel Adams Wilderness Map 1964

Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1962 by Ansel Adams

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John Muir Wilderness Map 1964

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Est. 1964

Ansel WildernessAdamsMap

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Est. 1964

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John WildernessMuir Map

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1970

During this time the Sierra Club is growing increasingly more politically active. Congress enacts the National Environmental Policy Act, establishes the Environmental Protection Agency, and denies funds for Everglades jetport. Club leads a coalition that defeats the National Timber Supply Act, which threatened old growth in the national forests. Membership passes 114, 000 and Club chapters cover all 50 states.

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Ansel Adams captures Lone Peak in 1970.

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In 1988, Club awards Clean Air medals to 270 congressional representatives for their efforts on behalf of clean air legislation, and the EPA releases a study showing that 135 million American live in communities that fail to meet air pollution standards. NASA official tells Congress that the greenhouse effect is influencing global climate. Congress reauthorizes the Endangered Species Act, adds parts of 40 rivers in Oregon to the National Wild and Scenic River System, and designates new wilderness areas in Alabama, Montana, Oklahoma, and Washington. President Reagan vetoes the Montana bill. Club celebrates John Muir’s 150 th birthday.

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In 1981, Sierra Club and other conservation groups gather more than one million petition signatures urging the ouster of Interior Secretary James Watt. Conservationists and local citizens join forces to prevent deployment of the MX missile in the Great Basin. Club helps block oil and gas leasing off the California coast. Mem bership passes 200,000.

1984

The air in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks is smoggier than New York City’s.

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Ansel Adams Last Interview Esterow

Milton

Ansel Adams: The Last Interview 1984

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Milton Esterow

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I think it’s apocryphal, but it sounds good. I better be careful I don’t begin to sound like a prophet. I think I might have said it in a conversation, and Nancy Newhall quoted it in her book. She wrote very fluently and very poetically. And the quote has been repeated. It’s a little apocalyptic.

I used to play the piano with oranges. I could do key studies, in fact. The left hand did the piano, the right hand the orange. It’s an extraordinary illusion, and it’s so funny when it’s done well. But you have to have the left hand perfect. The orange plays the black keys. All you need is the proper bounce, and you just roll it across. You learn the weight of the orange in relation to the weight of the keys, and it’s amazing. But it’s all pure fun. Nothing to do with art. I understand Picasso was a great prankster.

You said earlier that you’d work harder.

There’s a very beautiful comment of yours that’s quoted by Stegner. He is writing about the circumstances under which you took one of your best-known images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. He says that it’s a vision translated, the concept realized and done in 60 seconds or less. And then he quotes you as saying, “Sometimes I think I do get to places just when God is ready to have somebody click the shutter.”

Ansel Adams: The Last Interview

Two months ago, I spent two afternoons interviewing Ansel Adams at his home in Carmel, California. It was one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had. He was warm, brilliant, imaginative, sensitive, funny. We talked about everything from music to Georgia O’Keeffe to the glories of Point Lobos to how to unload my camera. I had planned to return to Carmel for further sessions, but he died on April 22. Following are excerpts from his last interview.

I’d work harder. I realize now I wasted time more as a young person.

Any other entertainments?

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1984

If you had it to do all over again, would you change anything? No.

Let’s talk about the environment. I think you said some time ago that you feel we’re on a disaster course.

Well, it boils down to the fact that the world is in a state of potential destruction. There’s no use worrying about anything else. The evidence of the destruction is in the pollution of the natural resources. With the Reagan Administration, especially when James Watt was secretary of the interior, the attitude has been terrible, completely exploitative.

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People ask me why I am so presumptuous as to write letters to the newspapers and all that. Somebody has got to do it. I would like to get more people to write letters. So I keep my promise of doing at least one thing a day, one thing related to the environment in some way.

You went on to say that “with all art expres sion, when something is seen it’s a vivid experience —sudden, compelling, inevitable. The visualization is complete —the seemingly instant review of all the mental and imagi native resources called forth by some miracle of the mind computer that we do not comprehend. For me, this resource is not of things consciously seen or transcriptions of musical recollections. It is perhaps a

What I did today was to write a letter to the governor of California expressing appreciation for Senate Bill 18 for state parks and recreation. A publisher once said to me, “Mr. Adams, I have a bit of advice for you about publishing. The secret is to get talked about. Good, bad, indifferent, anything, just get talked about. So—as long as you keep your integrity— whether you do things that irritate people or please people, you’re helping.

What did you do today?

In talking about Frozen Lake and Cliffs, your superb photograph of the Sierra Nevada in Sequoia National Park in 1932, you wrote, “I am interested in why I see certain events in the world about me that others do not see, while they respond to different events.” And you mentioned how a colleague of yours who was also there that day exclaimed, on seeing your print, “Geez! Why didn’t I see that?” And you said that some of his prints have evoked the same comment from you.

Milton Esterow

So you’re always working?

Basically it’s an analytic approach, as compared to the synthetic or structural rhythms of painting. I don’t mean “synthetic” in a secondary way. But I remember seeing John Marin paint. One morning in Taos he did about 15 or 20 watercol ors, one right after the other. He did a very famous, beautiful picture of the Taos Mountains, with those three black peaks, sometimes using his thumb. I asked him, “Am I bothering you?” He

1984 Ansel Adams: The Last Interview

summation of total experience and instinct. Nothing modifies or replaces it.” Has anything occurred to you since that you would like to discuss?

Even silly things like how the angle of this tape recorder is in line with the angle of that table. And the book is all out of arrangement. I can pull the book so that —there, now the whole thing pulls together and I’ve got a good composi tion. The painter, in his synthetic approach, could take a million impressions and distill them in one canvas or on a piece of paper. But in photography, the tendency is analytic.

I don’t know if you’d call it that, it’s just a constant state of searching awareness. Is that the right description? Not too pompous?

Well, it’s interesting. Everything works about the same as it did in the beginning. I’m just more in practice. I mean I’m always thinking of things sort of in relationship to each other. Looking at you as a portrait, I suddenly see you as an image. And I see certain design elements in the chair and on you; I’m instinctively trying to figure out how to place you or to obscure something behind you. Maybe you see me moving around like a cobra coming out of a basket.

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Aren’t you distilling in the process you just described?

Yes, but I can’t change the subject itself, you see . I only change the subject in relation to my point of view. We fudge sometimes doing portraits. When I had President Carter, I had to get him in a certain place next to the wall so that a tree wasn’t coming out of his ear.

No.

said, “Hell, no—I mean, thanks for the company. Thanks a lot. Come!” So I sat down and watched. It was just amazing to see all the stuff that would come into his mind, weeks’ worth of just sitting around Taos and walking out by the Rio Grande. And suddenly it comes to you. With photography I suppose you do accumulate ideas, but I’ve never had that particular feeling of “Well, that’s what I’ve been looking for.”

Ansel Adams 1902-1984

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Milton Esterow

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In 1997, Sierra Club heads off congressional attempts to weaken Endangered Species Act. Club lawsuit victories in California, Delaware, Georgia and Kansas force states and EPA to impose pollution limits in key watersheds. Sierra Club book, The Fate of the Elephant, by Douglas Chadwick, and lobbying lead to passage of Asian Elephant Conservation Act. Sierra Club Training Academy opens, has first graduates.

In 1998, the Sierra Club’s “Clean Air for Our Kids” campaign leads to adoption of tougher air quality standards to protect human health. Club campaign focuses on state control of pollution. Club in Wisconsin gets state to adopt moratorium on hardrock mining, which blocks proposed Exxon copper mine on Wolf River. Club convinces states to regulate highly polluting confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, and South Dakota.

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Bighorn Sheep Losing Ground, and Lives, to an Old Foe Martin Forstenzer 1998

Mountain lion taking down a Big Horn Sheep.

Bighorn Sheep Losing Ground, and Lives, to an Old Foe 1998

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Martin Forstenzer

Not long after settlers began streaming into the West in the mid-1800’s, bighorn sheep began disappearing. Unregulated hunting took its toll, as did diseases spread by domestic sheep.

Some estimate that as little as 2 percent of the vast numbers of bighorns of the West remain, but wildlife agencies in almost every Western state have stabilized their numbers in recent years through aggressive programs of reintroducing the animals to parts of their native ranges. Still, even in states where bighorns are considered to be doing well overall, individual herds are prone to catastrophic die-offs, largely from diseases. And some herds may be more susceptible to disease because they have been left isolated from other herds by changing Western landscapes.

But they have little defense against mountain lions, especially when the sheep move to lower elevations in winter. Severe bighorn declines are occurring in California, where biologists said the expanded mountain lion population is threatening an entire bighorn subspecies with extinction. The lions have also reduced the last native New Mexico herd to a single ewe and cut one Colorado herd by more than half.

In the Sierra over the past 15 years, “mountain lions have caused a behavioral change in bighorns,’’ Dr. Wehausen said. “They stopped coming down to their winter ranges, and that’s where they get nutrition and get out of the terrible environmental conditions of high windswept areas.’’

1998 Bighorn Sheep Losing Ground, and Lives, to an Old Foe

A wildlife study has shown that mountain lions once were held in check by other large predators like wolves and grizzly bears, but those predators were virtually eliminated by man in most of the West. Bounties once paid for the big cats were discontinued decades ago and restrictions were placed on hunting.

Yet other herds are being hit hard by a new scourge — one that few would have predicted 15 years ago. Mountain lions, greatly increased in number, have ravaged bighorn populations in several parts of the West, but especially in California.“There is not a single state in the West that hasn’t had problems with bighorn sheep,’’ said Dr. John D. Wehausen, a University of California bighorn sheep researcher. “They’ve always had a problem with disease, but what’s new is this whole mountain lion factor.’’

Bighorns have acquired a popular image as indestructi ble because of the ferocious rutting battles in which rams charge head-on into each other with loud crashes.

In California, a successful 1990 ballot initiative made it illegal for anyone, including state wildlife officials, to kill a mountain lion except in extreme situations. The number of lions is up in the state and across the West, biologists said, resulting in unexpected consequences for bighorns and other prey species.IntheSierra Nevada, a California Department of Fish and Game reintroduction program increased the bighorn population to 310 from 250 and re-established three herds, including one that ranged into Yosemite National Park. But mountain lions killed many of those animals in the 1990’s, and now only about 100 bighorns exist in the entire SierraDr.range.Wehausen, a bighorn sheep researcher called the Sheep God by some West Coast biologists, blamed mountain lions for the bighorn decline in the Sierra, directly and indirectly. The cats preyed on some sheep, but the greater effect was that terrified bighorns abandoned winter ranges that held prime forage they needed to survive.

The threat of losing Sierra bighorn populations may be especially acute. Challenging traditional bighorn taxonomic classifications, Dr. Wehausen has identified the Sierra animals as a separate subspecies, one that is nearing extinc tion. Because of that prospect, state wildlife officials are preparing to establish a captive breeding program to preserve the population.According to the California Department of Fish and Game, lions have also ravaged bighorns inhabiting the desert area from Palm Springs to Mexico. Many of those sheep, called peninsular bighorns and listed as endangered, perished from a viral disease beginning in the 1970’s, when, experts

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But some herds may face a more insidious threat. Biologists are concerned that even when diminished bighorn populations like the Sierra sheep survive, their genetic diversity may be so reduced that they will produce fewer, less healthy offspring or they will be left even more vulnera ble to random events like disease outbreaks.

believe, they numbered around 1,200. When the decline continued in the early 1990’s, the agency put radio collars on more than 100 of the animals to study the situation, said Steven Torres, a state wildlife biologist.

In some herds, 70 percent to 90 percent of the peninsular bighorns that died in the study were killed by mountain lions, Mr. Torres said. Only about 280 sheep are left in eight or nine herds spread over hundreds of square miles.

Decades of human tinkering with mountain lion populations in California led to trouble for bighorns, Dr. Wehausen said. Suppressing lion numbers for many years and then outlawing all killing of the cats caused the population to increase to record numbers, “like pushing down a spring and then releasing it,’’ he said.

In the northern Rockies, biologists are concerned that populations of the Rocky Mountain bighorn subspecies may be losing genetic diversity because of their isolation.

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In New Mexico, what had been the state’s largest bighorn herd and probably its last native population has now effectively been driven into extinction by a combination of disease and mountain lion predation. The desert bighorn herd in the San Andres Mountains of southern New Mexico plummeted from about 280 in the late 1970’s to the one ewe today. The herd was first reduced to 30 to 40 animals by a virulent scabies epidemic. “But the endgame, interest ingly, was primarily lion predation,’’ said Dr. Eric Rominger, a University of New Mexico wildlife biologist. “In the last 18 months, that herd went from 25 animals to just one. The vast majority of that was lion kill.’’ Other New Mexico herds also have been ravaged by mountain lions, he added.

Although the wild sheep have been durable enough to survive in North America for tens of thousands of years, the animals’ respiratory systems leave them especially vulnerable to disease. Epidemics of Pasturella pneumonia, often contracted through exposure to domestic sheep grazing nearby, have killed many bighorns, a problem worsened by the low reproduction rate of bighorn ewes, only one offspring a year, and in some years, none. Federal agencies now try to keep domestic sheep from grazing near bighorn turf.

Big Horn sheep in the Sierras

What biologists are seeing in California and New Mexico runs counter to what had been mainstream theory among wildlife biologists: that predators could not signifi cantly reduce a population of hoofed mammals. “We were taught wrong,’’ Dr. Wehausen said. “All the evidence is pointing more and more in that direction.’’

Martin Forstenzer

“We felt that disease would still be manifest, or some type of problem with lambs surviving,’’ he said. “To our surprise, what we found was that the primary problem in the majority of the range was mountain lion predation.’’

“Some populations of bighorns were stranded — they’re remnant populations isolated from larger blocks by habitat alteration: agriculture, roads and fire suppression,’’ said Dr. Jack Hogg, research biologist for the nonprofit Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute in Missoula, Mont.

1998 Bighorn Sheep Losing Ground, and Lives, to an Old Foe

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And that, in turn, means more problems for some herds.

“If a significant amount of genetic variation is being lost in the population as a whole,’’ Dr. Hogg said, “it is almost certainly affecting the immune system in some fashion.’’ But biologists searching for hopeful signs can look to a few places in the West where bighorns are thriving. In Arizona, which began reintroducing bighorns decades ago, the number of bighorns has increased from about 1,500 to 6,500.

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Martin Forstenzer

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In 2001, outgoing President Clinton moves to protect 60 million acres of wild national forests, including the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. The Sierra Club was the leading force in the campaign to protect these forests. Incoming President Bush then put the protection on hold. The EPA announced that General Electric must pay to clean PCBs from the Hudson River. The Club had long sought such a clean-up. Dade County decided not to fight to build an airport near the Everglades and Biscayne Bay national parks. Protecting these parks had been the focus of a Club campaign for several years. In 2006, the Sierra Club lawsuit succeeds in protecting Giant Sequoia National Monument from Bush administration plan to allow commercial logging.

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Fish Colorful as

Fly fishing in the High Sierras

Storyline of Mountain Days:The JohnMuir

Mountain Backdrop Bill Beche 2007

Musical Willows Theatre Company 2000

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Storyline of Mountain Days: TheMuirJohnMusical

Willows Theatre Company

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are transported to Dunbar, Scotland. It is a spring afternoon in 1849, and a boy is perched precariously on the pitched roof of a cottage. It is John Muir, valiantly, inching his way to the top. He sings:

throngs of immigrants appear, belongings in hand, to the wharf of Glasgow. They sing about their new life in America as the Muir family joins them and boards their ship:

I WANT TO TOUCH THE SKY CLIMB TO HEIGHTS WHERE I’VE NEVER BEEN AND AVERAGE MEN WILL NEVER KNOW

It is night. A darkened room. An old man is asleep at his desk, pen in hand. Behind him the silhouette of a woman enters, straightens his papers and gently strokes his hair. He awakens with a start as she fades away. The man is famous naturalist John Muir, in his “scribble den” in his Martinez home, writing down for posterity his thoughts and opinions formed over 73 years of wandering and pondering nature and God’s great universe. He pauses, and muses about how he, “a tramp, a vagabond without worldly ambition” should become so well known. How did it happen?

“John Muir! Coom away doon from that roof ye fightin’, bitin’, climbin’ pagan! We’re gan to America, where a mon can worship as he pleases; where the streets are paved wi’

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“As a lad in Scotland,” he says, “all I wanted was freedom - the kind which could only be found high above the schools and kirks and squabble of the streets of Dunbar - so every chance I Immediatelygot.”we

His reverie is broken by the entrance of his father, Daniel Muir, a devout minister and stern disciplinarian. He shouts in his angry Scottish brogue.

Immediatelygold!”

John Muir as a young boy

Storyline of Mountain Days:The John Muir Musical 2000

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I’LL BE A LEGEND IN MY OWN TIME AS SURE AS MY NAME’S FOR SURE! JOHN MUIR!

The other immigrants come on deck and sing of their ambition in counterpoint to John’s hymn to the sky

Willows Theatre Company

I’LL BE RICH I’LL BE FREE FIND SUCCESS CLIMB A TREE OR A MOUNTAIN

Night falls and a fierce storm tosses the ship. Young John emerges from behind a barrel and looks up at the mast. He grabs hold of the mast and starts to climb, singing:

COME AWAY, COME AWAY FROM THE WEARY LIFE YE KNOW AWAY ACROSS THE OCEAN TO AMERICA WE’LL GO COME AWAY, COME AWAY, LADDIE COME AWAY WITH ME COME AND FIND YOUR FUTURE NOT SO FAR ACROSS THE SEA!

I WANT TO TOUCH THE SKY WHERE THE FALCONS FLY A WILDERNESS WHERE NO MAN DARES TO GO

John Muir coming to America

YOU’RE AN EXCEPTIONAL YOUNG MAN, I HOPE YOU KNOW WHO CAN TELL HOW FAR A BOY LIKE YOU CAN GO THE HEIGHTS WHICH YOU CAN CLIMB,

The ship lurches with another wave and John loses his grip and falls as the scene shifts to Fountain Lake, the Muir family farm in Wisconsin.

When the song ends, John is a young man, and in charge of the new family farm “Hickory Hill,” and his father has decided to devote all his time to preaching. John shows his younger brother, Davey, a “labor-saving” device he has invented - his “early-rising machine” - that will keep time, light the fire and wake him dumping by him out of his bed in the morning. Davey loves it, and John shows other inventions: hydrometers, pyrometers, a clock he has mounted on the barn with fourteen foot hand so all the neighbors can see the time from the road.

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Soon we are at the Wisconsin State Fair of 1860, and John has won first prize for his inventions. He is invited by Mr. And Mrs. Ezra and Jean Carr to live with them in exchange for odd jobs. The Carrs open their extensive library to him and promise to see to his formal education at the University of Wisconsin, where Professor Carr is a faculty member. They see in him an extraordinary young man, and sing:

Storyline of Mountain Days:The John Muir Musical 2000

The five Muir children began their 17 hour workday in the fields, joined by their neighbors, who sing THE WORK SONG. John is lowered into a well to begin a day of digging as Daniel Muir strikes off on horseback to preach. Duncan, a neighboring farmer, checks on John’s progress and gets no response to his hails. He immediately pulls John, unconscious from choke gas, out of the well, and berates Daniel for his parsimony, which almost killed his son. John sings that he sees the face of God not in a church, like his father, but in flowers and trees and plants, as his neighbors continue to toil and sing WORK, WORK WORK

John Muir coming to America

It is late at night, several years later, and John is working in a factory in Indianapolis, surrounded by workers toiling away at their laborious tasks (WORK SONG). Although he is warned to be careful by a co-worker, his hands lose the grip on the file he is working with, and it flies up and strikes his eye. John screams and is plunged into darkness.

WE’RE ALL MADE OF THE SAME DUST MAN, AND TREE AND MOUNTAIN COVERED BY THE SAME SKY AND POURED FROM THE SAME FOUNTAIN WHERE ‘ERE WE GO FROM CRADLE TO TOMB WE ALL DWELL IN A HOUSE OF ONE GREAT ROOM SAILING ON THE SAME CELESTIAL SEA IN A CIRCLE OF ETERNAL UNITY.

John bids good-bye to his family and embarks on his first great adventure, the THOUSAND MILE WALK. He travels from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, meeting miners, farmers, Civil War soldiers on their way home through a ruined south. At the end of his journey he has determined the philosophy that will carry him through his days, and he sings:

Willows Theatre Company

John makes a promise that if his sight is restored, he’d never work on a machine again, but would devote his life to the inventions of God. Gradually, he tells us, “the dark became lighter, shadows became faces and the warmth on my face became the sun.”

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Storyline of Mountain Days:The John Muir Musical 2000

CLIMB THE MOUNTAINS GET THEIR GLAD TIDINGS THE DARK OF THE COLD CITY STREETS FIND A MEADOW TO PLAY IN A FOREST TO PRAY IN LEAVE YOUR CIVILIZED STRIFE FOR A FOUNTAIN OF LIFE!

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It is now two years later, and John is working as a wilder ness guide for hotel owner James Hutchings. A bevy of San Francisco society ladies arrive, having read a breast-beating romantic account of the wilderness experience by Countess Yelverton. They all request the dashing Mr. Muir for their guide (WHAT A LARK GETTING BACK TO NATURE). John escapes in terror to his mountain perch home, which he calls “the hanging nest.”

The scene shifts to the port of San Francisco, circa 1868. John has just arrived via a tramp steamer, and is immediately swept up in the hustle and bustle of the booming gold rush town, as gamblers, barkers and Bowery Ladies sing of their favorite town - SAN FRANCISCO

John and his traveling companion, an ambitious Cockney fellow by the name of Chilwell, escape the suffocating madness of the city for the high Sierra, where there is rumor of something greater than gold. They enter the Yosemite Valley, where John, for the first time, beholds the magnificent splendor. He tells Chilwell, “I’m home!” With t he roar of Yosemite Falls thundering above them, they sing the beautiful hymn:

John in FranciscoSan

John Muir signing with HutchingsJames

Jean Carr has meanwhile moved to a home in the Oakland Hills, and invites John to tea. After declining repeatedly, he reluctantly appears, hat in hand, where he is immediately ushered out to the balcony where a young lady, attempting to retrieve her dropped spectacles, has found herself perched precariously on the edge of a rock-like cliff. She calms herself by reciting John’s writings about Yosemite:

We next find John in his “hanging nest,” suffering from writer’s block, able to think of nothing but the intriguing Miss Strentzel. When a Scottish artist, William Keith, arrives, looking for a guide to show him some scenes of Yosemite that he might paint, John decides that this is exactly what he needs to get Louie off his mind. He climbs higher and higher, up mountains, rocky cliffs and even mighty redwoods; the act ends as John discovers that no matter where he goes:

I SEE HER SMILE NOW SHE’S LAUGHING AS WELL MY GOD! I’M IN LOVE AND BY GOD, LOVE IS HELL BUT THE WORLD’S SOMEHOW BRIGHTER THE LONGER I FIND THOUGH I’M DIRE DISINCLINED OUT OF ALL HUMANKIND THE WOMAN’S STILL ON MY MIND!

John overhears, coming to her rescue. They sing of their close encounter (IT’S GOT TO BE THE ALTITUDE) and, as he takes his leave, he asks her name. “Strentzel - Louie Strentzel,” she replies.

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Looking at Yosemite falls from this fissured point, towards noon in the spring, the rainbow on its brow seems to be broken up and mingled with rushing comets until the fall is stained with colors forming one of the most glorious sights conceivable.

Willows Theatre Company

Storyline of Mountain Days:The John Muir Musical 2000

As Act 2 opens, we find ourselves at the Strentzel ranch and adobe in Martinez, California. Louie and her father are strolling through the orchard, discussing, among other things, the mysterious Mr. Muir, when Dr. Strentzel spots a vagrant coming up the drive.

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“That’s no vagrant,” says Louie, “That’s the man I’m going to Johnmarry!”describes

MUIR

The scene shifts to John, in his “scribble den” in their large Victorian home in Martinez, as he ruefully tells Keith about his lost freedom, now that he has a large farm and 40 hands to manage and feed. And to make matters worse, Louie has decided to throw a garden party.

GREAT INFLUENCE THEY GROWINGSAY MORE ARROGANT EVERY DAY A CRUSADER! FANATICAL!

High society gentlemen and ladies swirl on the lawn to the lilting tune of the POLITICAL WALTZ, as a group of San Francisco politicians, including Gifford Pinchot and Phalen, bemoan Muir’s formation of a new conservationist group - the Sierra Club: IS A MAN OF

We immediately see the San Francisco ladies who hounded John out of Yosemite, having tea and commenting cattily on the rumors of a romance between John and Louie (LOVE’S IN BLOOM IN MARTINEZ). The song follows their three year courtship - interrupted by John’s travels to Nevada and Alaska - and ends as the couple is married.

how he just happened to arrive in Martinez after a 250 mile trip on a raft down the Merced and San Joaquin rivers, and the two happily retreat to the house, hand in hand.

John Muir saving Louie

WHEN INDUSTRY CALLS, SELL IT OUT

The waltz (and the party!) end when John becomes enraged after overhearing the politician’s discussing a plan to dam the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park to provide water to San Francisco, and throws them all out of the house.

“A ranch that needs and takes the sacrifice of a noble life, or work, ought to be flung away,” she replies.

“You need to be true to your own self, John.”

“You can’t go explorin’ and run a ranch, Louie,” he says.

“And you.”

Willows Theatre Company

NOT TO EMPHASIZE HIS FAULTS AS WE WALTZ AROUND, SOUND PERFECTLY SINCERE

“I can’t just... “

TELL THE VOTERS WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR MENTION “CONSERVATION,” THEN TURN ABOUT

John Muir singing

Louie, aware of the fact that running the farm is destroying the man she loves, urges him to return to his beloved Yosemite for awhile.

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LOVE IS NOT A LAW

Louie singing about John

A RIVERS EBB AND FLOW

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YOU’RE STILL LYING NEXT TO ME CLOSER THAN MY HEART

The scene shifts to the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, where President Teddy Roosevelt has agreed to meet with Muir to discuss the protection of the magnificent trees - which are being dynamited by the hundreds to provide lumber for pastures fences. Under the stars in the glorious setting, Roosevelt is so taken with Muir he expresses his delight in song:

John Muir and Teddy Rosevelt

OR AN ORDER TO REMAIN BY MY SIDE

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AND YOU! I KNOW YOU LOVE ME, BUT

LOVE IS LIKE A RIVER

LOVE IS NOT A CHAIN

LOVE IS NOT A CAGE

LOVE IS KNOWING WHEN TO LET YOU GO.

WHENEVER WE’RE APART

Storyline of Mountain Days:The John Muir Musical

WHEN WE TWO ARE WONDERFULLY UNITED TO PRESERVE THIS SACRED PLACE

SUNLIGHT ON A CURTAIN LAUGHTER ON THE STAIRS A CANDLE IN A BEDROOM MY CHILDREN AT THEIR PRAYERS KNOWING THEY ARE SAFE AND SOUND KNOWING HE IS NEAR MY LIFE IS ORDINARY THINGS AND ALL OF THEM ARE HERE.

BEFORE IT’S IRRETRIEVABULLY GONE WITHOUT A TRACE!

LOUIE DON’T GO WE HAVEN’T FINISHED THE RAINBOW YOU DIDN’T TELL ME HOW FAST TOMORROW COULD FLY

It is the following year, 1904, and Louie is passionately playing the piano while John once again becries the plan to dam Hetch Hetchy. To get his mind off the problem, she sends him out to play with their young daughters, Helen and Wanda, while she watches from an upstairs window and sings of the joy of ORDINARY THINGS:

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ITS TRULY BULLY BULLY WHEN ONE NIGHT YOUR CAUSE IS INCONTESTABULLY RIGHT YOUR REASON UNIMPEACHABULLY CLEAR AND THE FOREST IRREPLACEABULLY DEAR GIVE A ‘CAUSECHEERITSBULLY BULLY BULLY

John departs on a trip across Europe and Asia, while Louie stays behind to mind the farm, but a telegram from a doctor brings him back to Martinez, to find Louie gravely ill, suffering from a tumor on her lung. While John recites the passage about the rainbow in Yosemite she remembered from that balcony meeting so long ago, Louie quietly dies. John reprises her song:

Willows Theatre Company

NATURE’S PEACE WILL FILL YOUR SOUL WALK THE WOODS, SMELL THE AIR AND SORROW AND CARE OF LIVING WILL EASE

Storyline of Mountain Days:The John Muir Musical 2000

BLOWN AWAY WITH THE BREEZE.

CLIMB THE MOUNTAINS GET THEIR GLAD TIDINGS

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LEAVING ME TO WATCH THE COLORS DIE.

It is several weeks later, and Helen enters, entreating John to resume his writing, and reminding him of how angry Louie would be if she knew she was the cause of his silence. Before He can respond, the house shakes with an earthquake. John and the girls run to the lawn, and ride out the quake, only to see a plume of angry black smoke rise from the direction of San Francisco!

As John joins her, a child dressed in 1920’s clothing takes up her song, then a family in 1940’s clothes, and all the decades to today, until the stage is filled with people of all ages and nations and times singing John’s words and carrying the message to the future:

CLIMB THE MOUNTAINS GET THEIR GLAD TIDINGS LEARN TO WANDER THE REST OF YOUR DAYS

She picks up the final paper he has been working on, and sings the words:

John, defeated and feeling like his life’s work has come to nothing, lies gravely ill in a hospital room in Los Angeles. While the ghosts of his past — farmers in Wisconsin, politi cians, all Americans — waltz through his mind, Louie appears, and reminds him that “words live forever. You may have lost a battle, John, but you won a war.”

The lack of water to fight the fire, and the destruction of San Francisco redoubles the effort to find a new water supply. John takes on his final battle - a seven year effort to prevent the damming of his beloved Hetch Hetchy valley - A VALLEY HAS A SOUL. But, with Roosevelt out of the White House, and some shady behind-the-scenes deal-making, the Raker Bill authorizing the dam passes.

LOVE IS LIKE A RAINBOW FADING TO “GOOD-BYE”

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Willows Theatre Company

Finale numbermusical

John Muir singing

FIND A MEADOW TO PLAY IN A FOREST TO PRAY IN LEAVE YOUR CIVILIZED STRIFE FOR A FOUNTAIN OF LIFE.

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Trout as Colorful as Mountain Backdrop

Bill Becher

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“Today you are your horse,” said Joyce Karoleski, who worked for the outfitter. I was Trojan, a chestnut gelding quarter horse and draft horse mix.

The next morning, instead of eating backpacker’s fare like instant oatmeal, we had pancakes, eggs and bacon. Dinners included steak and lobster tail with broccoli, salad, garlic bread and beer chilled in a mountain lake. And instead of schlepping 60-pound backpacks, the patient mules carried our gear.Ihiked with Cutter and several others to Thousand Island Lake. That was when the trout posse arrived in the old-West drumming of hooves and a cloud of dust.

After 10 miles of dusty riding through conifer forest, we reached Clark Lake, our campsite for two nights. After dinner, the fly-fishing guide Lisa Cutter provided casting lessons. The wranglers turned out the horses after attaching bells to their bridles. The horses galloped down to the mead ow by the lake and grazed as the bells chimed and alpenglow lighted the distant peaks with a soft pink blush. Brook trout jumped in splashy rises in the lake.

Trout fishing in the Sierras

Trout

Rainbow and brook trout also thrive at sea level, but golden trout are generally found in waters above 7,000 feet in the Sierra. Getting to the goldens in this wilderness takes strenuous hiking or riding a horse or a mule.

Winters are long and harsh here, and the summer feeding season for fish is short. That means a 12-inch fish is a trophy, but also that the rainbow, brook and golden trout that swim in the Sierra’s lakes and streams are eager to take a fly. Describing golden trout — California’s official freshwater fish — requires reference to the colors on a painter’s palette. The trouts’ bellies are brilliant cadmium yellow shad ing to orange, their midsections are marked with a slash of vermilion, and their backs are speckled with burnt-umber dots.

With 12,945-foot-high Banner Peak and Mount Ritter as a backdrop, the lake was dotted with its eponymous islands. Casting a Stimulator — a bushy deer-hair fly designed to imi tate a range of insects — with an ant pattern or pheasant-tail nymph attached as a dropper produced more rainbow and brook trout from the lake and adjacent stream.

as Colorful as Mountain Backdrop 2007

Our mounts picked their way nose to tail up the vertigi nous trail that leads into the backcountry. Trojan occasional ly stumbled. I thought about my bailout options — a downhill fall meant tumbling over a cliff with 1,000 pounds of horse. But Trojan never fell. Some knowledgeable riders prefer riding a mule; they say mules are more sure-footed than horses.

ANSEL ADAMS WILDERNESS, Calif. — The sound of drum ming hooves rolled across Thousand Island Lake toward Banner Peak, which was draped with gleaming white glaciers. A dozen riders on horses appeared in a cloud of dust — a sight I had seen before only in movies. A mule carried fly rods for the riders who were on a five-day trip to fish for the trout that inhabit the high country of California’s Sierra Nevada.

I had decided to ride. The trip started in June Lake, Calif., at the Frontier Pack Train. We were told that our packer, wrangler and cook, who all wore chaps and spurs, would refer to us by our horses’ names until they learned our names.

On the third day, we set out for the Alger Lake Basin to pursue the golden trout. Once thought a separate species, California golden trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss aguabonita, are now classified as a subspecies of rainbow trout.

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Trout were originally stocked by miners and later by the Sierra Club, but now the California Department of Fish and Game uses an airplane to drop fingerling rainbow and golden trout in high country lakes.

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Cutter and her husband, Ralph, have opposed the department’s stocking practices, arguing that the fish in many Sierra lakes are self-sustaining and that stocking has hurt endangered species like mountain yellow-legged frogs that l ive in the high lakes.

Anglers love to talk about the big one that got away, but in the Sierra the small ones we caught and released are what we talked about on the long ride back to civilization.

In Alger Creek, the golden trout, whether stocked or wild, are easy to catch. An EC Caddis, a fly designed by Ralph Cutter to imitate a crippled emerging caddis fly, proved irresistible to the fish. Alger Creek tumbles down a hillside in a series of plunge pools, some no larger than a kitchen sink. A fly dapped into the cold, clear water yielded a brightly colored fish on nearly every cast.

But not everyone thinks that is a good idea.

Bill Becher

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In 2011, the Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign received a $50 million gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies, more than 12,000 citizens surrounded the White House in opposition to the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and roadless protections were reinstated on the Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest, home to the largest temperate rainforest on earth. In 2012, Influenced by Club petitions and member support, the U.S. Department of the Interior releases plan to protect 11 million acres of the Western Arctic Reserve from oil and gas drilling. This is the largest administrative lands conservation action in over 30 years.

Warming winters and dwindling Sierra Nevada snowpack will squeeze water resources in parts of California Michon Scott 2018

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The Sierra Nevada’s snowpack is at the lowest level ever seen in 2015.

Environmentalism’s Racist History Jedediah Purdyr 2015

Bird Conservation in the Sierra Edward C. Beedy and Edward R. Pandolfino 2013

Study Finds Snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada to Be Lowest in 500 Years Nicholas St. Fleur 2015

Sierra Nevada Snow Won’t End California’s Thirst Henry Fountain 2016

Bird Conservation in the Sierra

2013

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Edward C. Beedy and Edward R. Pandolfino

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HISTORY

Fire regimes in the Sierra prior to European settlement likely consisted of frequent, low-intensity fires started by lightning or native people, maintaining an open-forest understory and supporting development of large areas of mature forest. Stand-clearing fires certainly also occurred and the resulting landscape was probably characterized by a mosaic of many different plant communities. Frequent chaparral fires maintained broad swathes of vegetation in early successional conditions and fire in grass-lands and oak savanna created patches of open, treeless expanses. All these conditions would have produced a variety of habitats supporting a correspondingly high diversity of birds. Aggressive fire suppression in the Sierra began in the early 1900s and became more widespread and effective through

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We can only speculate about the impacts on birds from all these changes because no comprehensive, large-scale studies of Sierra wildlife were conducted until the early decades of the 20th century. Logging of large trees almost certainly decreased the available habitat for species such as Northern Goshawks, Spotted Owls, and Pileated Woodpeckers. Grazing of mountain meadows degraded these habitats and must have reduced habitat for Willow Flycatchers, Yellow Warblers, and Lincoln’s Sparrows. Gold-mining degraded stream-side habitats for riparianassociated birds, including a diversity of migrating neotropi cal songbirds such as fly-catchers, vireos, warblers.

Human impacts on the Sierra and its birdlife began thou sands of years before European settlement. Native peoples used fire as a management tool to clear brush, maintain grasslands and meadows, make travel easier, and improve browse for game animals. Fire management, hunting, fishing, and gathering by Native Americans affected plant and animal communities in the Sierra and likely altered the relative abundance and distribution of some bird species long before the first Europeans arrived.

FIRE AND CURRENT FORESTRY PRACTICES

Bird Conservation in the Sierra 2013

The discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills in 1848 dramatically accelerated these impacts and added to them demolition of hillsides (typically with powerful water cannons) and diversions and excavations of nearly every stream on the West Side from Butte County south to Madera County, all in a frantic search for gold. The top predators, grizzly bears and wolves, were systematically exterminated. To encourage railroad companies to invest in the transcontinental railroad in the late 19th century, the United States gave large swaths of Sierra land to these companies by granting them every other section (a one-mile by one-mile square) of land along the proposed route. The result was a checkerboard of public-private ownership that has inhibited rational conservation planning ever since. One of the most direct effects on Sierra birds including ducks, geese, quail, and grouse came from “market hunting” to feed burgeoning gold rush populations as well as rampant shooting and persecution of raptors.

Changes caused by native peoples over a 10,000-year span prior to the 19th century paled in comparison to the impacts of European settlers and their large-scale, aggressive use and abuse of Sierra resources. Forests were logged extensively, with the largest trees targeted, and sheep and cattle swarmed over mountain meadows that had never experienced such intense grazing pressure. At lower eleva tions exotic annual grasses were introduced and dominated the grasslands and savannas so quickly that no naturalist was ever able to observe or describe the pre-European plant communities. Some speculate that native bunch grasses dominated, but the true nature of these original landscapes and most Sierra plant communities remains unknown.

Changes in public attitudes about nature and wildlife over the past few decades have eliminated or modified most of these historically damaging practices, and state and federal agencies are now tasked with managing public lands and wildlife resources using science-based approaches that help protect and enhance habitat for Sierra birds. Hunting is now highly regulated, and raptors are protected and mostly revered by the public. Logging, grazing, and mining practices are all regulated in an attempt to balance resource extraction with protection of natural resources, and riparian and wetland areas are being protected and enhanced as never before. The U.S. Forest Service and numerous nonprofit conservation organizations have actively worked to acquire land to eliminate the checkerboard pattern of ownership in the Sierra and strive to restore and enhance ecosystem processes and habitats where possible.

Historical, unregulated overgrazing was so pervasive throughout the range that most experts in this field believe that not a single pristine Sierra meadow system remains. Many areas of these habitats have been altered right down to the basic hydrology that supports the entire meadow system. Eroded streams incise and cut deep channels, lowering water tables such that even when grazing is re moved, the system cannot return to its prior wetland state without active intervention by restoration ecologists. However, grazing is now much reduced and more highly regulated, and efforts to restore these meadows are produc ing encouraging results. The U.S. Forest Service has part nered with other federal and state agencies and non-profit conservation organizations to implement multiple resto ration projects throughout the Sierra.

No major river system in the Sierra has been spared the impacts of dams or water diversions to provide water for human uses and to control flooding. While reservoirs have destroyed hundreds of miles of riparian habitat and drowned thousands of acres of meadows, likely contributing to the decline of the Harlequin Ducks and many meadow-depen dent species, they have also created habitat that many species of water birds such as ducks, geese, and grebes have been quick to exploit. More recently, recovering populations of Bald Eagles and Ospreys are taking advantage of these human-made lakes to the point where they could be more numerous now in the Sierra than historically. Similarly, the massive diversion of foothill streams and the resulting canal systems that began with gold mining have led to the acciden tal creation of perennial wetlands in the north-central Sierra

the 1950s. Ironically, the major legacy of those years of fire suppression is a landscape that has higher densities of younger trees and denser understory, providing fuels that increase the frequency and size of large-scale, highintensityMorefires.recently, forestry practices have recognized the important role of fire in the Sierra ecosystem. National Parks like Yosemite and Sequoia now have policies that allow most lightning-caused fires to burn, and also include con trolled burns to reduce fuel levels. On publicly owned lands, fire-suppression policies have also been modified, and controlled burns are part of the management strategy. However, consideration given to commercial timber harvest ing priorities, air quality, and nearby human residential areas all make implementation of these policies difficult. Experiments using selective logging to change fire behavior to reduce the risk of large stand-clearing fires are being conducted throughout the Sierra. It remains to be seen whether these practices are effective or economically practical. Their impact on wildlife is also difficult to predict. In any case, to the extent that birds have adapted to current conditions, any changes are likely to be detrimental to some species and beneficial to others.

Edward C. Beedy and Edward R. Pandolfino

MOUNTAIN MEADOWS

One of the most problematic ongoing forestry issues is post-fire salvage logging. When stand-clearing fires occur, the resulting landscape looks like a wasteland to the general public and represents an opportunity to harvest many large trees for commercial timber interests. However, a large and rapidly growing body of research (much of it conducted by the U.S. Forest Service) shows that removal of all or most of the largest standing dead trees (snags) is detrimental to a wide variety of cavity-nesting birds such as woodpeckers and bluebirds as well as other species that make extensive use of these landscapes for foraging (e.g., Olive-sided Flycatchers and Black-backed Woodpecker). Much needs to be done to bring salvage logging policies in line with the best conservation science. In addition, forestry practices like herbicide application to suppress shrub growth and to accelerate regrowth of trees may not only be counterproduc tive, they may alter the succession of different habitat types that support diverse bird communities.

In spite of the fact that old growth forests occupy less than one-fifth of their historical extent, these mature forests are still being logged both on private land and to a lesser extent on National Forests, further stressing birds that require this forest type. Even where protected from logging, the historical lack of fire has increased the density of shrub under-story and smaller trees and increased the risk that this dwindling forest type could be lost to high-intensity fire. Clear-cutting and planting of even-aged, single-species tracks continues on private lands with a corresponding decrease in habitat diversity for birds and other wildlife.

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DAMS AND WATER DIVERSIONS

There may be no more compelling conservation success story than the one surrounding the banning of DDT in the United States in the late 1970s. This pesticide caused eggshell thinning, which had devastating impacts on populations of many bird species (see the “Family and Species Accounts” section of the book for the accounts of Bald Eagle and Peregrine Falcon as examples). Once the link was proven and the compound banned, the affected species recovered to the point that some have been removed from the Endangered Species List.

LAND USE CHANGESAlthough many recent trends in human attitudes and practices are cause for optimism, land use changes in recent decades pose major threats to some Sierra habitats. The most serious threats are to the grassland, savanna, and chaparral habitats of the West Side foothills. Nearly all these lands are in private ownership and could be developed in the future. In recent decades residential and rural residential develop ment has impacted the foothills more than any other part of the Sierra. In addition, thousands of acres have been converted from relatively wildlife-friendly cattle ranching to orchards and vineyards. As compared to the huge vine yards in the Central Valley that consume entire landscapes, much of the vineyard land in the Sierra occurs in smaller patches within a matrix of natural habitats. However, large contiguous areas of habitat are fragmented into smaller and smaller parcels, and efforts to protect homes and crops from

Bird Conservation in the Sierra 2013

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INTRODUCTIONS OF NON-NATIVE SPECIES

that have enabled the state-Endangered Black Rail to success fully colonize these areas. These changes are both a testa ment to the massive destructive power of humans and the remarkable adaptability of birds.

Since then, they have moved steadily into higher and higher elevations. Sierra birds have not adapted to this brood parasite that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. Effects remain relatively localized at higher elevations but are widespread in much of the low- and middle-elevation habitats that support more abundant cowbird populations. The populations and ranges of susceptible host species such as Willow Flycatchers and Yellow Warblers shrank dramati cally because these species were unable to successfully fledge their own young while simultaneously raising a cowbird chick. The introduction of aggressive cavity nesters such as European Starlings and House Sparrows has likely impact ed some native cavity-nesting birds. However, the fact that starlings and House Sparrows are mainly associated with urbanized areas has limited their impacts in the Sierra.

While European Starlings, Rock Pigeons, and House Sparrows may be the most visible of the non-native Sierra birds, no species has had a larger impact on native breeding birds than Brown-headed Cowbirds. Originally native to the Great Plains, where they followed herds of bison and pronghorns, cowbirds were unrecorded in California before 1870, although some may have been present on the East Side of the Sierra decades before that. By the 1930s, however, they were common and widespread in the Central Valley and Sierra foothills as they spread northward from Mexico and Arizona, taking advantage of the livestock grazing that accompanied human incursions into the Sierra.

It is hard to assess whether or not more recent intentional introductions (e.g., Wild Turkeys and White-tailed Ptarmigans) or rapid range expansions (e.g., Great-tailed Grackles and Eurasian Collared-Doves) will affect native Sierra birds in the future.

Continued diligence and careful research on pesticides is needed, however, as hundreds of new chemicals enter the environment every year and there is generally little testing for impacts on wildlife. Some have suggested links between environmental contaminants and recent widespread declines in some species such as Loggerhead Shrikes and American Kestrels. However, no solid evidence has emerged to confirm a link or identify a specific compound. Human development along the shores of Lake Tahoe has contaminated the once-pristine waters there, and air pollution from urban traffic has severely affected air quality in the foothills east of Sacramento, which has been shown to stress pine trees and other native vegetation and could be leading to subtle habitat changes. Direct impacts on birds have yet to be shown in either case, but degradation of water or air quality is likely to have widespread consequences across the entire natural community.

POLLUTION, PESTICIDES, AND OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINANTS

the threat of fire (a natural, and critical, component of these ecosystems) impact all the land adjacent to these new land uses.

Despite the challenges described here, we have good reason to be hopeful about bird conservation in the Sierra. Never before have so many people cared so deeply about nature in general, and birds in particular, and been willing to work to preserve natural habitats. Regulatory protections in place today would have been unthinkable even 50 years ago, and the new Sierra Nevada Conservancy provides a forum for collaborative, science-based approaches to managing Sierra bird and other wildlife populations. Most of the Sierra above the foothills is in public ownership, and many of the largest private landowners have strong commitments to good land stewardship.

SUMMARY

Bird Conservation in the sierra Birds demonstrate to us again and again their astounding capacity to adapt. Indeed, the data summarized in the chapter “Recent Trends in Sierra Bird Populations and Ranges” suggest that more species in the Sierra are increasing than decreasing. More than almost any other organisms, birds are highly mobile, and many species can find and colonize new areas of habitat quickly. As human populations continue to increase and

As the climate changes, bird species are expected to shift their distributions independently, in some cases resulting in combinations of co-occurring species that have not been seen before. Species using the highest altitudes for breeding (e.g., American Pipits, Gray-crowned Rosy-Finches) may be unable to find suitable habitat in the future. Changes in winter snow-pack and spring temperatures could affect downstream riparian systems by reducing the amount of water and changing the seasonal timing of peak flows. These changes could alter the streamside vegetation and effect birds using those habitats.

Two comprehensive reviews of the conservation status of the Sierra, the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP) (California Resource Agencies 1996) and the Sierra Nevada Framework analysis (U.S. Forest Service 2001) came to the identical conclusions that this region faces urgent threats. In 2004 the SNEP report helped catalyze the formation of a new state agency, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, which has the mission of initiating and supporting efforts that “improve the environmental, economic and social well-being of the Sierra Nevada Region, its communities and the citizens of Califor-nia.” This organization is tangible evidence of the high value that Californians place on protection of the Sierra and recognition that land use policies and manage ment must focus on maintaining healthy ecosystems that provide high- quality water, spectacular scenery, and import ant wildlife habitat for all of California.

SIERRA BIRDS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE Predicting the impacts of global climate change on the Sierra and its birds is particularly challenging. The nature of California’s climate is inherently complex due to the effec ts of long-term and short-term weather pattern cycles in the Pacific Ocean and the highly varied topography of the state. While California has seen some warming during the past century, the changes are less dramatic than in many other regions of the United States. Most climate models predict a warmer Sierra climate, possibly including more precipitation, but with more of that precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. These models also predict that by the second half of the 21st century, temperatures in the Sierra foothills could increase by 3.5° to 7.5° F and the frequency of extremely hot days (greater than 100° F) could almost double. Data from recent studies from areas of the Sierra first surveyed a century ago suggest that birds are indeed gradually moving (generally upslope) to remain within relatively similar climate zones.

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HOPE FOR THE FUTUREAhistoric 1994 decision by the State Water Resources Control Board reversed a long-term decline of the Mono Lake ecosystem caused by more than fifty years of water diversions from its principal tributary streams. This decision restored the stream flows and will eventually increase the surface elevation of Mono Lake to an average of 6,392 feet, which should ensure that this critical ecosystem will provide suitable habitat for myriad water birds in the future. Ongoing restoration efforts at Owens Lake and the upper Owens River, also degraded by historic water diversions, are also important steps toward restoring essential bird habitats in the eastern Sierra.

Edward C. Beedy and Edward R. Pandolfino

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mountainstheCowbird.Brown-headedarenotabirdnativetoSierraand are an invasive species. Planned theenvironmentwaterwaysimpactsSierrasGoldenvironment.thehaveunplannedandfiresdamagedSierra’smininginthehadlastingontheandofSierra

Pileated wood peckers are a bird native to the Sierra mountains. Mountains.

competition for critical resources like water and open space becomes more intense, we must combine our capacity to invent with our unique capacity to appreciate the inherent value of other species and create solutions that maintain viable, diverse populations of birds in the Sierra and elsewhere.

Bird Conservation in the Sierra 2013

The

Rock pidgeons are not a bird native to the Sierra mountains and are an invasive species.

Edward C. Beedy and Edward R. Pandolfino

Sierras has had many environmen tal impacts.

Loggin on private lands in foothillstheofthe

Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1917, left, before the construction of O’Shaughnessy Dam, and in 1933, right, after the area was flooded to create the reservoir.

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SierrabirdGoshawksNorthernisanativetothemountains.

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Nicholas St. Fleur

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“Having an ultrasensitive record of wet-season precipita tion in ancient blue oak trees is a gift of nature to the modern water-dependent world,” Dr. Stahle said in an email.

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The paper is the first to create a model that describes temperature and precipitation levels on the Sierra Nevada that extend centuries before researchers started measuring snow levels each year.

The Parched West: Exploring the Impact of Drought After analyzing the data, the team determined with its model that snowpack levels as low as this year’s were a once-in-1,000-years event. But because of rising temperatures caused by human activities, the researchers said they thought that snow droughts would become much more frequent.

A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University, said the study added to evidence that rising tem peratures had exacerbated the lack of snow in California.

Some researchers said the results were valuable to un derstanding the current drought. Others found the results to be less surprising.

The paper, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, used tree-ring data from centuries-old blue oaks to provide historical context for the mountain range’s diminished snowfall. As of April 1, the snowpack levels were just 5 percent of their 50-year historical average.

“The 2015 snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is unprecedent ed,” said Valerie Trouet, one of the authors of the study and a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona. “We expect ed it to be bad, but we certainly didn’t expect it to be the worst in the past 500 Snowmeltyears.”fromthe Sierra Nevada fills reservoirs that provide a third of all of the drinking water for the state of California, as well as water to fight wildfires and to generate“Theelectricity.scopeofthis is profound,” said Thomas Painter, a snow hydrologist with NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory, adding that models like the one developed in the study sug gested a dry future for California in years beyond the current drought. “This has been a very bad drought, and being able to understand the context of it is extraordinarily important.”

Usingmatched.thiscorrelation, the team combined the precipita tion data with a second data set of tree rings that looked at winter temperatures from 1500 to 1980.

“I don’t think anything they say is alarmingly shocking,” said David Rizzardo, the chief snow surveyor at the California Department of Water Resources. “From a department perspec tive, you can go back 500 years or 10,000 years, it doesn’t really change the context of the here and now. We’re stuck in thisNoahsituation.”Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford, said the study provided valuable information about the historical context of the drought, which would help in understanding its causes. He said that, when combined with previous studies, the new findings helped “provide strong evidence that global warming has substantially increased the probability of getting these extremely low snow conditions.”

Study Finds Snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada to Be Lowest in 500 Years 2015

The snow that blanketed the Sierra Nevada in California last winter, and that was supposed to serve as an essential source of fresh water for the drought-stricken state, was at its lowest levels in the last 500 years, according to a new study.

California has a Mediterraneanlike climate, which means that it receives most of its precipitation in the win ter and is dry during the summer. The blue oaks that encircle the Central Valley and cover the rolling foothills of the Sierra Nevada serve as a good indicator of snowfall on the mountains because they are very sensitive to winter precipitation, accord ing to David W. Stahle, a geoscientist from the University of Arkansas and an author of the paper.

Many of the winter storms that pile snow on the Sierra Nevada also fall as rain on the blue oaks. The trees use the moisture stored in the soil to grow during the spring and sum mer, and the width of their tree rings reflects the amount of precipitation from the preceding winter. Wide rings indicate wet winters, while narrow rings denote dry ones.

To determine snowpack levels from 500 years ago, the research team combined two data sets of blue oak tree rings. The first set provided historical precipitation levels from more than 1,500 blue oaks from 33 sites in California’s Central Valley. The team compared part of that data from the years 1930 to 1980 with actual snowpack measurements and found that both findings

“We are now migrating into this new world where temperatures are higher,” Dr. Williams said. “So even though the chances of an event like this were extremely unlikely in the past, in the future it will be more likely to occur.”

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RacistEnvironmentalism’sHistory

2015

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Jedediah Purdy

Grant has been pushed to the margins of environmen talism’s history, however. He is often remembered for anoth er reason: his 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,” a pseudo-scientific work of white supremacism that warns of the decline of the “Nordic” peoples. In Grant’s racial theory, Nordics were a nat ural aristocracy, marked by noble, generous instincts and a gift for political self-governance, who were being overtaken by the “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” populations. His work influenced the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted im migration from Eastern and Southern Europe and Africa and banned migrants from the Middle East and Asia. Adolf Hitler wrote Grant an admiring letter, calling the book “my Bible,” which has given it permanent status on the ultra-right. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who killed sixty-nine young Labour Party members, in 2011, drew on Grant’s racial theory in his own Grant’smanifesto.fellowconservationists supported his racist ac tivism. Roosevelt wrote Grant a letter praising “The Passing of the Great Race,” which appeared as a blurb on later edi tions, calling it “a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, who headed the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History (and, as a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, named the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Velociraptor), wrote a foreword to the book. Osborn argued that “conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love ofForcountry.”Grant,Roosevelt, and other architects of the coun try’s parks and game refuges, wild nature was worth saving for its aristocratic qualities; where these were lacking, they were indifferent. Grant, as his Times obituary noted, “was uninter ested in the smaller forms of animal or bird life.” He wrote about the moose, the mountain goat, and the redwood tree, whose nobility and need for protection in a venal world so re sembled the plight of Grant’s “Nordics” that his biographer, Jonathan Spiro, concludes that he saw them as two faces of a single threatened, declining aristocracy. Similarly, Roosevelt, in his accounts of hunting, could not say enough about the “lordly” and “noble” elk and buffalo that he and Grant helped to preserve, and loved to kill. Their preservation work aimed to keep alive this kind of encounter between would-be aristo cratic men and halfway wild nature.

Madison Grant (Yale College 1887, Columbia Law School) liked to be photographed with a fedora, or just his dauntingly long head, tilted about thirty degrees to the right. He belonged, like his political ally Teddy Roosevelt, to a Manhattan aristocracy defined by bloodline and mon ey. But Grant, like many young men of his vintage, felt du ty-bound to do more than enjoy his privilege. He made himself a credible wildlife zoologist, was instrumental in creating the Bronx Zoo, and founded the first organizations dedicated to preserving American bison and the California redwoods.

Grant spent his career at the center of the same energet ic conservationist circle as Roosevelt. This band of reformers did much to create the country’s national parks, forests, game refuges, and other public lands—the system of environmental stewardship and public access that has been called “America’s best idea.” They developed the conviction that a country’s treatment of its land and wildlife is a measure of its character. Now that natural selection had given way to humanity’s “complete mastery of the globe,” as Grant wrote in 1909, his generation had “the responsibility of saying what forms of life shall be preserved.”

Madison Grant is known less for his conservationist efforts than for his book “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,” a pseudo-scientific work of white supremacism.

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For these conservationists, who prized the expert gov ernance of resources, it was an unsettlingly short step from managing forests to managing the human gene pool. In a 1909 report to Roosevelt’s National Conservation Commission, Yale professor Irving Fisher broke off from a discussion of pub lic health to recommend preventing “paupers” and physical ly unhealthy people from reproducing, and warned against the “race suicide” that would follow if the country did not re plenish itself with Northern European stock. Fisher took the term “race suicide” from Roosevelt, who, in a 1905 speech, had pinned it on women who dodged childbearing. Gifford Pinchot, the country’s foremost theorizer and popularizer of conser vation, was a delegate to the first and second International Eugenics Congress, in 1912 and 1921, and a member of the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society, from 1925 to 1935.

In “Our Plundered Planet,” Fairfield Osborn, the son of Madison Grant’s friend and ally Henry Fairfield Osborn, forecast that postwar humanitarianism, which allowed more people to survive into adulthood, would prove incompati ble with natural limits. While neither man evinced Madison Grant’s racial obsessions, they shared his eagerness to champi on an admirable “nature” against a debased humanity that had flourished beyond its proper limits.

Roosevelt put Pinchot in charge of the National Conservation Commission, and made him head of the new Forest Service, but he also cultivated the Romantic natural ist John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892. In the Sierra Club’s early leaders, the environmental movement has some less troubling ancestors. Following Muir, whose beard ed face and St. Francis-like persona were as much its icons as Yosemite Valley, the club adopted the gentle literary romanti cism of Thoreau, Emerson, and Wordsworth. The point of pre serving wild places, for these men—and, unlike in Roosevelt’s circles, some women—was to escape the utilitarian grind of lowland life and, as Muir wrote, to see the face of God in the highButcountry.Muir,who felt fraternity with four-legged “animal people” and even plants, was at best ambivalent about hu man brotherhood. Describing a thousand-mile walk from the Upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, he reported the laziness of “Sambos.” Later he lamented the “dirty and irregular life” of Indians in the Merced River valley, near Yosemite. In “Our National Parks,” a 1901 essay collection written to promote parks tourism, he assured readers that, “As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.” This might have been incisive irony, but in the same paragraph Muir was more concerned with human perfidy toward bears (“Poor fel lows, they have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother man”) than with how Native Americans had been killed and driven from their homes.

Their literary icon, Thoreau, had said in his 1854 speech “Slavery in Massachusetts” that even his beloved ponds did not give him pleasure when he thought of human injustice: “What signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? . . The re membrance of my country spoils my walk.” But Thoreau also shared Muir’s problem; in some ways, he created it. When he wrote about American nature, Thoreau was arguing about American culture, which, even for most abolitionists, meant the culture of a white nation. In his essay “Walking,” which gave environmentalists the slogan “In wildness is the preser vation of the world,” Thoreau proposed that American great ness arose as “the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.” For both Muir and Thoreau, working, consuming, occupying, and admiring American na ture was a way for a certain kind of white person to become symbolically native to the continent.

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This strain of misanthropy seemed to appear again in biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 runaway best-seller “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich illustrated overpopulation with a scene of a Delhi slum seen through a taxi window: a “mob” with a “hellish aspect,” full of “people eating, people washing,

Jedediah Purdy

The nineteen-seventies saw a raft of new environmen tal laws and the growth of the Sierra Club’s membership from tens to hundreds of thousands. But the decades of advocacy behind this wave of environmental concern shared much with the older, exclusionary politics of nature. In 1948, more than a decade before Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (most of which was first published in this magazine), a pair of bestselling works of popular ecology sounded many of Carson’s themes, from the dangers of pesticides to the need to respect nature’s harmonies. William Vogt’s “Road to Survival” em braced eugenics as a response to overpopulation, urging governments to offer cash to the poor for sterilization, which would have “a favorable selective influence” on the species.

It is tempting to excuse such views as the “ordinary” or “casual” racism of the time, and it does feel more like a symptom of the dominant culture than Grant’s racism and Pinchot’s eugenics, which touched the nerves of their organiz ing commitments. But Muir and his followers are remembered because their respect for non-human life and wild places ex panded the boundaries of moral concern. What does it mean that they cared more about “animal people” than about some human beings? The time they lived in is part of an explanation, but not an excuse. For each of these environmentalist icons, the meaning of nature and wilderness was constrained, even produced, by an idea of civilization. Muir’s nature was a pris tine refuge from the city. Madison Grant’s nature was the last redoubt of nobility in a levelling and hybridizing democracy. They went to the woods to escape aspects of humanity. They created and preserved versions of the wild that promised to exclude the human qualities they despised.

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Even as environmentalism took on big new problems in the seventies, it also seemed to promise an escape hatch from continuing crises of inequality, social conflict, and, sometimes, certain kinds of people. Time described the environmental crisis as a problem that Americans “might actually solve, un like the immensely more elusive problems of race prejudice or the war in Vietnam.” In his 1970 State of the Union address, in which he expended less than a hundred words on Vietnam, made no explicit reference to race, and yet launched a new racialized politics with calls for a “war” on crime and attacks on the welfare system, Richard Nixon spent almost a thousand words on the environment, which he called “a cause beyond party and beyond factions.” That meant, of course, that he thought it could be a cause for the white majority.

Environmentalism largely was that. When the Sierra Club polled its members, in 1972, on whether the club should “concern itself with the conservation problems of such spe cial groups as the urban poor and ethnic minorities,” forty per cent of respondents were strongly opposed, and only fifteen per cent were supportive. (The phrasing of the question made the club’s bias clear enough.) Admitting to its race problem took the movement nearly two decades. In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published an influential report that found that hazardous waste facilities were disproportionately located in minority communities, and called this unequal vulnerability “a form of racism.” The en vironmental movement, the report observed, “has historically been white middle and upper-class.” Three years later, activ ists sent a letter to the heads of major environmental organi zations, claiming that non-whites were less than two per cent of the combined seven hundred and forty-five employees of the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council (N.R.D.C.), and Friends of the Earth. Fred Krupp, then executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, replied with a mea culpa: “Environmental groups have done a misera ble job of reaching out to minorities.”

Some of the awkwardness of environmental politics since the seventies, now even more acute in the age of cli mate change, is that it lays claim to worldwide problems, but brings to them some of the cultural habits of a much more pa rochial, and sometimes nastier, movement. Ironically enough, Madison Grant, writing about extinction, was right: the natural world that future generations live in will be the one we create for them. It can only help to acknowledge just how many en vironmentalist priorities and patterns of thought came from

Still, the major environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, were written with no atten tion to the unequal vulnerability of poor and minority groups. The priorities of the old environmental movement limit the effective legal strategies for activists today. And activists acknowledge that persistent mistrust goes beyond immediate conflicts, such as the split over California’s climate-change law, but can make them more difficult to resolve. Bernard attributes some of the misgivings to environmentalism’s histo ry as an élite, white movement. A 2014 study found that whites occupied eighty-nine per cent of leadership positions in environmental organizations.

Environmentalism’s Racist History 2015

people sleeping. ? . . People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating? . . People, people, people, people.” He confessed to being afraid that he and his wife would never reach their hotel, and reported that on that night he came to understand overpopulation “emotionally.” By the evidence, what he had encountered was poverty. Ehrlich was announcing that his environmentalist imperatives were powered by fear and repugnance at slum dwellers leading their lives in public view. At the very least, he assumed that his readers would find those feelings resonant.

Since then, “environmental racism” and “environmental justice” have entered the vocabulary of the movement. There are many environmentalisms now, with their own constituen cies and commitments. In the Appalachian coalfields, locals fight the mountaintop-removal strip mining that has shattered peaks and buried more than a thousand miles of headwater streams. Activists from working-class Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles have opposed parts of California’s landmark climate-change legislation, which the large environmental groups support, arguing that it gives poor communities too little protection from concentrated pollution. Despite some such conflicts, large, well-resourced national groups such the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council seek out these groups as partners in everything from environmen tal monitoring to lawsuits. Mitch Bernard, director of litigation at N.R.D.C., says, “It’s no longer a national group swooping down on a locale and saying this is what we think you should do. Much more of the impetus for action, and the strategies for action, come from the affected community.” (I worked under Bernard at the N.R.D.C., in the summer of 2000.)

an argument among white people, some of them bigots and ra cial engineers, about the character and future of a country that they were sure was theirs and expected to keep.

Jedediah Purdy

ParksourinwasRoseveltTheodorewhoinstrumentalestablishingNationalSystem

A photograph taken by John Muir on one of his excursions.

John drawingMuir’sof Mt.andMeelureMt.Lyele.

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John Muir in his study in his home.

Camp of the Clouds, August 18th, 1888 taken by John Muir.

Drawing floorYosemiteofValleybyJohnMuir. Two women of the Miwok tribe. One of the native tribes of Yosemitetheregion.

2016

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Sierra Nevada Snow Won’t End California’s Thirst

Henry Fountain

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Many of those concerns stem from the effects of climate change and the structure of Sierra forests, which can influence how the snowpack accumulates and melts. Because the snow, in effect, serves as a reservoir that is released over time, any changes can affect how much water is available for people, industry and agriculture, and when.

NevadacoveredpartiallytheSierraincentral California in 2016

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — Thanks in part to El Niño, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is greater than it has been in years. With the winter snowfall season winding down, California officials said that the pack peaked two weeks ago at 87 percent of the long-term average.

That’s far better than last year, when it was just 5 percent of normal and Gov. Jerry Brown announced restrictions on water use after four years of severe drought. But the drought is still far from over, especially in Southern California, where El Niño did not bring many major storms.

Sierra Nevada Snow Won’t

Despite the better news this year, there are plenty of worrying signs about the Sierra snowpack, which provides about 30 percent of the water Californians use after it melts and flows into rivers and reservoirs, according to the state Department of Water Resources.

The effects of warmer temperatures can already be seen here, Dr. Bales “Historically,said.this has been the reliable snow zone, where it accumulates till late March or early April and then melts,” he said. But now the snowpack here is more like that at lower elevations, “where it will accumulate, melt, accumu late, melt,” he said.

“We’ll be getting more rain and less snow here,” said Roger C. Bales, a professor at the University of California, Merced, and a principal investigator with the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory, which studies snowpack and other water-related issues. “That means less snowpack storage and fasterDr.runoff.”Bales was standing on a snowy slope in Yosemite last Thursday, at about 7,000 feet elevation, just off a 19th-cen tury wagon road that is used by hikers and snowshoers. Nearby, amid car-size granite boulders and close to a soaring Ponderosa pine, were instruments that he and his fellow researchers use to obtain detailed information about the snowpack in several spots throughout the southern Sierra.

The data from Dr. Bales’s instruments will not be downloaded until later in the spring, but just up the slope, other instruments set up by the Department of Water Resources send data continuously to state offices in Sacramento. Last Thursday, they recorded a water equiva lent of 18.36 inches. With warm spring temperatures, the snowpack here was past its peak, with the water equivalent declining by more than three inches in less than two weeks.

Climate change is also expected to increase precipitation in some areas, because warmer air can hold more moisture. But it is not yet clear if that will be the case in the SierraSnowpackNevada. is measured in “snow water equivalent,” or how much water would result if the snow were melted. When snow first falls in the Sierra, it is usually dry and powdery, with about 10 to 12 percent moisture by volume, but as it accumulates and compresses, the moisture content rises to about 40 percent. So 30 inches of snow on March 30 would be equivalent to about 12 inches of water.

“We are seeing an ever-increasing percentage of annual and winter precipitation in liquid rather than solid form,” said Randall Osterhuber, who spends winters at the lab. The altitude above which snow accumulates is becoming higher as temperatures warm. “That change in elevation means a lot less terrain is covered in snow.”

Proof was close at hand, as well. Until the last quar ter-mile of a two-mile hike here from 6,300 feet, snowshoes were not needed. What snow remained was in small patches.

Snow

End California’s Thirst 2016

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Similar effects of climate change have been seen through out the Sierra, including at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, which is operated by the University of California at Berkeley near the Donner Pass, about 120 miles to the north. Researchers there still make some measurements the way they have since the lab started in the 1940s, by inserting special metal tubes into the snow.

Mohammad Safeeq, a colleague of Dr. Bales at the university, said that, in general, water was flowing off the mountains two

Water-stressed trees are more susceptible to pests and disease, so one result of the changes is more tree deaths. This is readily apparent at Yosemite in the drive from the valley floor, where the green hillsides are dotted — in some cases in large numbers — with the brown of dead pines and firs.

“We’re strategically sampling the landscape,” Dr. Bales said. “We pretty much know what topographic features affect snowpack.” That will give water managers a truer understand ing of how much water the snowpack will generate.

Trees also affect the amount of water stored in the mountains simply by growing, sucking up water from the ground. Some of it is used in photosynthesis, but much of it is lost through evaporation and transpiration through the leaves and stems. Dr. Bales and his colleagues study this, too, with instruments atop towers that measure the flow of water vapor from the tree canopy.

weeks earlier than in the past. “Two weeks in a three-month summer window is significant,” he said.

Contributing to the problem is the fact that there are many more trees here than there used to be. A century ago, Dr. Safeeq said, Yosemite had perhaps 20 trees an acre; now the number is closer to 100. That means more of the melting snowpack never gets off the mountain to the valley below, he said. The greater number of trees is due in part to years of forest agency policies under which small natural fires were quickly extinguished to protect homes and other property in the mountains.

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A pole used tosnowmeasuredepth.

The Department of Water Resources instruments are set up in a relatively open part of the forest. The observatory’s instruments, by contrast, are near the Ponderosa pine, and there are three of them: one next to the trunk, one a little farther away where water drips from the tips of the branches, and one in the open, about 20 feet away. Other sensors, which are buried, detect how much water is in the ground.

Henry Fountain

Warmersaid. temperatures also mean that trees grow faster, and don’t necessarily shut down for the winter. Thus they use more of the melting snow, and over a longer period. That leaves less water to flow into streams and down to reservoirs.

The goal is to gather a complete picture of the snowpack, which is far from a uniform blanket of white. A tree, for example can affect snow cover in several ways, Dr. Bales said. Some snow is caught by the branches and turns directly to vapor. Other flakes melt and the water drips to the ground. The tree trunk itself absorbs sunlight and re-emits it as heat, melting the snow around it. Boulders do the same thing. Even the tiniest pieces of forest litter — needles or bits of pine cones — can heat up in the sunlight and cause melting.

The scientists learned that a lot of water was lost through the trees — more than was even thought to be there in some cases. “That told us the precipitation estimates that people had for higher elevations were just plain wrong,” Dr. Bales

Less snow, earlier melting and faster growth mean that more trees are running out of water in the summer.

But with climate change affecting how much water is available from the mountains, she added, “we have to think about how we’re going to manage these forests.”

Fire suppression is a controversial subject in California. But thinning the forest by letting small fires run their course would increase snowpack because more of the snow would reach the ground, and less of the water would be taken up by the trees. That could be, in effect, like adding an entire new reservoir of water in the mountains, rather than building a new billion-dollar reservoir down in the valley.

Roger C. Bales, a investigatorprincipal with the areFlat,instrumentscheckingZoneSierraSouthernCriticalObservatory,onatGinwheretheremonitoring that record snowpackconditionsmoisturein

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But smaller, less intense fires are nature’s way of thinning the forest, culling trees that are less fire-resistant, said Martha H. Conklin, a Merced professor and another principal investigator with the observatory. Paradoxically, because fire suppression leaves so much timber on the mountains, it can lead to much bigger and hotter fires, like the Rim Fire that burned 250,000 acres in and around Yosemite and destroyed more than 100 structures in 2013.

If small fires were allowed to burn, Dr. Conklin said, “you’d have a forest of a very different structure.” Even the types of trees would eventually change, she said, as species that are better able to resist fire replaced others. “I don’t know if we can ever go back to a forest that has a natural fire regime,” Dr. Conklin said. “It’s very difficult to let a fire burn if you have houses dispersed in the forest.”

Sierra Nevada Snow Won’t End California’s Thirst 2016

stations

Henry Fountain

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ErinSafeeqMohammadandStacyfrom the University of snowpackmeasuringMerced,California,in the Sierra Nevada, an waterimportantsource.

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Michon Scott

Warming winters and dwindling Sierra Nevada snowpack will squeeze water resources in parts of California

This image shows the historical average elevation of the snowpack’s center of mass for water years 1985–2016 for each Sierra Nevada subregion, and the chance that the subregion’s center of mass will retreat upslope. Note that the percentages are estimated probability changes, not changes in the center of mass’ movement or elevation. Given a 1°C (1.8°F) increase in average winter temperature, the snowpack is likely to decline, and snowlines are likely to rise to higher elevations.

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Based on the new study, this figure shows how the snowpack could fare in the Sierra Nevada with a 1°C (1.8°F) increase in average winter air temperature. Hydrologists consider the entire Sierra Nevada mountain range, but also divide the range into four regions: Northwest (NW, purple); Northeast (NE, magenta); Southwest (SW, dark pink); and Southeast (SE, pale pink). The study makes multiple estimates for each subregion. A few of those estimates appear here, all for April 1. That date is generally considered the end of the snow accumulation season and the start of the melt season, although the onset of spring melt varies by year and region.

Subregions in the Sierra Nevada have different responses partly due to differences in elevation. Using the altitude of 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) above sea level as a benchmark reveals substantial regional differences, with subregions having the following percentages of their area located above that elevation: Northwest: 4 percent; Northeast: 16 percent; Southwest: 48 percent; Southeast: 36 percent. Portions of the mountain range with less area at high elevations are more vulnerable to snowpack losses in a warming climate, meaning the northern Sierra Nevada—especially the expansive Northwest subregion—may fare the worst. The study authors also point out that, as the snowpack’s center of mass migrates upslope, changing snow conditions will present new challeng es for snowpack observation and forecasting. That’s because in situ observation sites have historically been located at lowerAcrosselevations.theSierra Nevada, increases in average tempera ture bring greater risks of both below-average snowpack and snowpack shifts upslope. The graph in the lower right com pares those risks for a temperature increase of 1°C (1.8°F), 1.5°C (2.7°F), and 2.0°C (3.6°F) over the entire mountain range. With 1.5°C of winter warming, the odds that a given year’s snowpack will be below average increase by more than 30 percent. Wit. 2.0°C of winter warming, the odds of be low-average snowpack rise by more than 40%. These sorts of changes in Sierra snowpack will likely have profound— and expensive—impacts on everything form salmon runs, to ski resorts, to regional fire risk.

Snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada Mountains provides roughly 75 percent of California’s agricultural water, and 60 percent of Southern California’s water resources. Warm winters can cause snow droughts in the Sierra Nevada, both by nudging precipitation in the direction of rainfall rather than snowfall, and by melting snow sooner. A new study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, uses historical records and modeling to understand how the Sierra Nevada snowpack may respond to rising temperatures.

2018

2000202020101990198019701960195019401930192019101900189018801870 Michon Scott

Figure 2f from: Irimia R, Gottschling M (2016) Taxonomic revision of Rochefortia Sw. (Ehretiaceae, Boraginales). Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e7720. https://doi. org/10.3897/BDJ.4.e7720. (n.d.). doi: 10.3897/ bdj.4.e7720.figure2f Fountain, H. (2016, April 11). Sierra Nevada Snow Won’t End California’s Thirst. Retrieved from nia-snow-drought-sierra-nevada-water.htmlwww.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/califorhttps://

Lone Pine Peak, Sierra Nevada, California (x1971-207.3). (n.d.). Retrieved from collections/objects/11579https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/ Lynn, B. (n.d.). Cougar Vs Ram. Retrieved from cougar-vs-ram/.outdoorlife.com/photos/gallery/hunting/2010/02/https://www Maps. (n.d.). Retrieved from Muir,[Mountainplanyourvisit/maps.htmhttps://www.nps.gov/yose/scene].(1901).J.(n.d.).HetchHetchyValley.EnvironmentandSociety,74–79.doi:10.2307/j.ctt1ht4vw6.15(n.d.).Retrievedfromhttps://www.artinnaturephotography.com/wordpress/2016/sierra-perfection-hiking-fishi ng-rafting/ (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.sierrawild.gov/wilderness/ (n.d.). Retrieved from Staff.Sly,Environmentalism’sPrelle,Poole,Pollutedmagazines/arthttp://www.maryellenmark.com/text/news/905N-000-001.htmlparadise.(2005,September13).Retrievedfromhttps://www.latimes.com/science/la-os-smogparknew13sep13-story.htmlR.M.,&Essick,P.(2017,September14).TheMountainsThatMadetheMan.Retrievedfromhttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/10/ansel-adams-wilderness/M.(2017,September25).Hooked:LearningtoFlyFishintheHighSierraBackcountry.Retrievedfromhttps://www.visitmammoth.com/blogs/hooked-learning-fly-fish-high-sierra-backcountrySierraPerfection~Hiking,Fishing,andRaftingPurdy,J.(2017,June19).RacistHistory.Retrievedfromhttps://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-historyA.,Anderson,D.,&Wood,H.(n.d.).TheYosemite.Retrievedfromhttps://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/(2010,May5).HowYosemiteBecameaNationalPark.Retrievedfromhttps://www.myyosemitepark.com/park/how-yosemite-becameSt,N.(2015,September

Adams, & Ansel. (1963, January 1). [Sierra Nevada, winter evening, from the Owens Valley]. Retrieved https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/00650438/from Adams, & Ansel. (1963, January 1). [Sierra Nevada, winter evening, from the Owens Valley]. Retrieved https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/00650438/from Adams, & Ansel. (1970, January 1). From Glacier Point, Yosemi te Valley. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/97515318/ Adams, & Ansel. (1970, January 1). The Sentinel, Yosemite Valley. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ Backdrop.item/97515358/Retrievedfromchine/1998/09/29/065005.htmlchine.nytimes.com/timesmadoors.htmlBighornnytimes.com/2007/09/29/sports/othersports/29outhttps://www.SheepLosingGround,andLives,toanOldFoe.(n.d.).Retrievedfromhttps://timesma

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Beedy, E., Pandolfino, E., Hansen, K., & Stallcup, R. (2013). Bird Conservation in the Sierra. In Birds of the Sierra Nevada: Their Natural History, Status, and Distribu tion (pp. 39-44). University of California Press. Re trieved February 11, 2020, from www.jstor.org/sta ble/10.1525/j.ctt2jcbgg.10

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