Unnatural preservation

Unnatural preservation

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TOPIC: Unnatural Preservation....
http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees/browse_thread/thread/22e0f982a4bf061f?hl=en
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Feb 16 2008 2:48 pm
From: DON BERTOLETTE

Beth/ENTS-I hope that everybody has the time to visit www.hcn.org (High Country News) to view the article in this months online pub. In particular, the article on page 13 called "Unnatural Preservation..." has pertinent implications to a broad scope of global issues, and perhaps one of regional concern to those involved with the HWA eradication efforts.I've snipped out a small section, pasted it below, to encourage discussion.
From M. Martin Smith and Fiona Gow: www.hcn.org p.13 February 4th, 2008
"As the planet grows hotter, and the consensus mounts that the temperature is not turning back now, there may be a lot less meaning in the idea of preserving "naturalness" than has been the case. After all, in the not-too-distant future, the state of nature will in many cases be something nobody's ever seen.

So far, however, public-land managers have responded by doing almost nothing, according to a new report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the agency that evaluates federal programs. By and large, the GAO says, officials who manage U.S. Public lands have simply ignored a 2001 Department of Interior directive ordering them to identify and protect resources that might be threatened by climate change.

This is no minor failure. An emerging scientific consensus says that unless the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, state fish and game departments and private environmental organizations re-direct their missions to deal with climate change, they'll oversee the advance of nationwide environmental catastrophe. The character of public wildlands will be drastically and permanently altered.

So professional preservationists, and the environmental movement as a whole, are left with unnatural choices:

They can intervene aggressively to maintain habitat threatened by planetary warming- installing sprinkler systems around California's giant sequoias, to name one suggestion floated by scientists. In the process they would become something akin to farmers and pet fanciers.

They can intervene aggressively to provide huge migration paths northward for heat-threatened plants and animals Because this would require them to help dramatically change existing ecosystems, it would turn the current conservation ethic on its head.

Or they can decide to continue to use the traditional hands-off approach- and thereby allow millennia-old ecosystems to die off and be replaced in ways that would never have happened natural, if not for global warming."

The 2001 Act that was ignored, was created by then President Clinton, who reasonably enough felt that those agencies should "consider and analyze potential climate change effects in their management plans and activities...since 2001, of course, these federal departments have been ultimately directed by George W. Bush, who has famously not concerned himself with climate change."
Will and others, any comment on the GSMNP response to the HWA, and other scenarios that might be climate change driven?

-D

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