Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil P
Humans have made a lot of land changes to the plants that cover our surface, but nature left on its own devices is arguably making much more drastic changes nowadays than human are in the US. There's huge, rapid changes happing now in the non coastal western US where plants that once dominated are being replaced by others.
Sagebrush land is disappearing at an incredibly rapid pace: The West is losing 1.3 million acres of sagebrush. That's almost a Taos county size chunk of land (or chunk of land almost as big as Delaware for easterners) that is changing composition to grassland or conifer woodland, each and every year. The sagebrush biome used to cover 1/3 of the US prior to the 1800s! That's been slashed by half.
My question is is this a bad thing? There's certainly species that are endemic to the sagebrush biome, but there's also species that are endemic to the biomes that are replacing the sagebrush. Here is Taos, locals tell me that sagebrush took over due to chronic sheep overgrazing. People now go take brush grinders on skid steers and chew up the sage. What comes back is a meadow, there's a lot more grass growing with the sage gone than the sage there, and more things munch on grass than sagebrush.
Now a lot of the replacement is coming from introduced species. One of the dominant grasses that has taken over the west in the sagebrush's wake is smooth brome - a non native from Hungary. It's often decried as invasive, and it will form monocultures and crowd out natives. But, it does grow a lot faster than natives and grows on disturbed sites. So while it may not be munched on as much as other species, it is accumulating biomatter much faster than anything native and when the grass dies and rots, that's a lot more soil to work with.
I can't find the article now, but there was one that found that an area the size of Iowa has went from un-treed to partially treed across the Great Plains and West over the last 30 years and an area the size of Nebraska is expected to become partially treed instead of grassland or sagebrush land in the next 30. And in the mountain forests, beetles are slicing out huge swaths of spruce and lodgepole pine. But I'd argue that that's natures way of dealing with a monoculture, that a forest is healthier 30 years after the beetle attack than it was before. It's certainly less destructive than a fire.
My question is why is land change ALWAYS painted as a negative thing by the media? Wouldn't it be safer to assume that nature is upgrading herself rather than downgrading? |
Just some thoughts:
First off, I don't consider "the media" to be all that knowledgeable about the more technical topics they publish. So many of those writers have agendas and they're seeking larger readerships. So many hacks get it wrong...they either don't understand the nuances of their subject matter and distort unintentionally, or what they really want is to foment emotion, fear and polarization. That stuff sells more media. They're hoping to set firecrackers under their readers. Truth may have little to do with it.
Most folks are suspicious about change. Altering the status quo is seen as a threat, rarely a good thing. Change means we may be forced to abandon the familiar, what we are used to doing. Stability and familiarization breeds inertia. So, change is often portrayed as negative in the media.
I think another big problem is that different segments of society have different views of what "sagebrush" rangeland should be or actually is. So, their goals for it are different. They all want to create, maintain, or re-establish different conditions. What is "natural" or "healthy" anyway? It may be based on chronological, not ecological time. How do we decide what extent of sagebrush habitat is desirable, too much, too little?
Do we want the extent that existed during the continent's interglacial eras and their associated lakes and floodplains? The extent that existed before indigenous tribal manipulations (such as burning)? While the western US was influenced by native buffalo herds or not? Before European settlement and wide scale sheep and cattle grazing, bad range practices and dust bowl erosion? Before cheatgrass or wildfire suppression? Or some future 21st century staus quo? The more recent historical conditions are most familiar to the living, so a departure from that seems wrong. Even if that departure is actually good for wildlife and its habitat.
Each of those regimes was influenced by, favored and discouraged different cohorts of native plants and animals. How much sagebrush (as compared to a mix of perennial bunchgrasses for example) is good? How much is a symptom of degradation? Then of course there's natural change which we can't predict very precisely and have little to no control over: global climate shifts that are NOT exacerbated by human activity compared to climate shifts that ARE.
If you try to use threatened or endangered wildlife species as coal mine canaries or health indicators you run into trouble there too. If the at risk sage grouse thrives in a sagebrush dominated landscape does that mean we actually want to maintain a degraded condition so we don't lose the grouse? Is the grouse a keystone species or a relict of bad range practices? Did we just get used to having lots of sage grouse around because a degraded range was the 19th or 20th century status quo? If they start declining, is that a good thing or a bad one?
One societal segment's idea of a desirable "natural" dryland landscape is based on very different things than another. Until these various interest groups reach some sort of consensus about what "sagebrush" country should or shouldn't be, the debate and confusion will continue. Meanwhile, Rome continues to burn, so to speak.
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