The Greenville News
Jeanne Brooks column
Posted 11/13/2008 3:26 PM EST
If they ran, terrified, as if just ahead of a raging forest fire.
If herds of deer, breathing hard, flanks dark with sweat, bounded over bushes and leaped across streams. If droves of bears and foxes and raccoons, hearts pounding like jackhammers, raced crashing through the underbrush. And if the birds — all of them — took wing suddenly, massed flights of owls and sparrows and hawks wheeling overhead, calling alarm.
Maybe then we’d notice.
If an army of fleeing creatures stampeded in panic down our Main Streets and through our parking lots and over our lawns, and we could smell smoke and see the sky was orange, and the wind carried burning cinders that stung our flesh.
Maybe then we would grasp the urgency.
But it doesn’t and won’t happen that way. Time is relative. What’s fast as a speeding train for nature can seem nearly imperceptible change to you and me.
So while the climate warms at a pace that we adjust for by what we wear and where we set the thermostat, and hardly give the matter a second thought, as yet anyway, plants and wildlife will be — are being (see: penguins and polar bears) — overtaken by events.
Steve Moore, of the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, says a changing climate is natural. We’ve had ice ages in the past, for instance. Those animals and plants that could adapt, did. Those that couldn’t died out. "Extinction is a normal process," Moore points out.
What’s different now is the pace of change. We’ve speeded things up with our greenhouse gases. Plants and animals can’t adapt fast enough.
Or they run out of places to retreat to. Alpine species that live on the sides of mountains, for example, can move higher and higher but eventually they run out of mountain.
When species try to move to new habitats, we’re often in the way. One of our roads is or a building or parking lot. Imagine a tiny species of frog trying to cross Interstate highways or find a way around a sprawling shopping complex.
"Overall," Moore says, "scientists think that as many as 30 percent of existing plant and animal species worldwide could be at risk of extinction" as the earth grows warmer. It would be "one of the major extinction events of all time."
It wouldn’t be good for us either, and not only for aesthetic reasons or because the earth would become emptier of different things to see and learn about, and therefore less interesting.
"Between 1981 and 2002, 74 percent of new anticancer drugs and 78 percent of antibiotics were natural products, derived from (plants, microbes and animals) or inspired by them," Eric Roston writes in The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat.
Scientists are attempting or suggesting various stopgap measures. About 1,400 seed banks have been set up around the world to preserve plant life. Norway has constructed a "doomsday" vault to keep backup examples of as many as three million different crops.
Some conservationists have begun to talk about the controversial idea (see: kudzu) of moving varieties of plants and animals to new locations to save them. This is called assisted colonization or assisted migration.
Others argue for intensified efforts to preserve land, especially corridors of land such as connecting national parks, so species can relocate or migrate on their own.
But mainly, Moore says, "We need to get off fossil fuels."
