At a visitor center overlooking a deep foreboding chasm cut by the Gunnison River, I picked up a small Park Service brochure. On a rare chance to get away from the farm, sheep, and late garden harvest last October, we visited some lesser known units of the National Park Service—Black Canyon and Colorado National Monument, with the intriguing Grand Mesa in between.
In another life I would have been a park ranger, and much to the frustration of my family, I love thoroughly investigating visitor centers. I love the wild and don’t like crowds, but the interface between the two epitomized in National Parks and their visitor centers fascinates me. These parks are really ours—collectively not personally, which is important, and therefore deserve our collective care.
The brochure that caught my eye was on “Climate Change in National Parks”—one of several by that name over the years as the Park Service saw increasing impacts and let the public know. I reread and pondered that brochure over the next several weeks as it brought home the severity and urgency of climate change impacts on our world—but in a very personal way. This particular brochure came close to home—on the edge of its satellite map of the Mesa Verde fires was our own community. (In writing this, I feared I had misplaced the hardcopy, so I went the Park Service climate webpages to search for climate change publications—to my surprise they hadn’t been deleted!)
The brochure was blunt. The Joshua trees in the lonely park I traversed in a VW bug almost 50 years ago may not survive in that park much longer as the winters warm. The climate-induced beetle outbreaks threatening my favorite pine, the Whitebark, are causing profound ecological unravelings. The pinyon pines in southwestern parks are suffering the same fate as those in our own backyard. The glaciers in Glacier Park are disappearing, and I worry I won’t get back to see them again before they are gone. Mangroves will likely be inundated where we visit our daughter in Florida. All treasured memories and things I want to see again—preferably as they were, but that’s not in the cards. Natural changes are one thing, but those at our hands make me sad and make me angry.
Climate change impacts are real, are here now, will get worse before better, and could get much, much worse if we don’t act soon. The brochure explains that “the magnitude and pace of these changes…are unprecedented in human history.” I have been guilty of repeatedly saying that “we need to act now” more than I have given really clear ideas of what we can do. Finally, after absorbing all this and then seeing DiCaprio’s “Before the Flood”, I decided to make it as clear as possible in our outreach. We work in food, so we posted a simple outline of what people as individuals and then as communities can do to Address Climate Change with Local Food and a similar page for Addressing Biodiversity. So there is plenty to do with local food as a tool, and that will lead to actions in other parts of our lives like transport, home energy use, consumerism, and more.
Action is even more critical now given the new political climate. Political will on the national level to confront climate change is distressingly low, so we must do much more on the local level—perfect for actions regarding food. The impacts on the many plants, animals, and ecosystems of these far-flung parks allow us to “experience” or internalize the depth of the severity and the urgency of climate action that we would not experience just in our home territory—even if we never visit many of these places. Social research shows that personal experience and impacts on our possessions is what makes climate change real. These parks are our possessions, albeit collective ones, but can help engage us all more deeply.
These parks themselves are under political attack by some groups as well, but I am confident that we love them enough to keep them intact. These lands are our national treasures. I am hopeful that the absurdity of some recent efforts to downplay science, ignore climate change, defund environmental protections, and act unfairly to other people, our society, our environment, and our future will actually back-fire. Those tweets from Badlands National Park are a sure sign of hope, and live on even after being deleted.
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