Ecology

The Great Lakes & Midwest Biospheres

/ bigdiff / 1 Comment

This year I completed loops around all the Great Lakes, crossing the Canadian border in Minnesota, upper & lower Michigan, and western & northern New York, visiting biospheres in both countries. In Canada, UNESCO Biospheres are tourist destinations, where you can hike and see and learn about wildlife, in addition to and separately from their wonderful national and provincial parks. In the US, while some national parks are also internationally recognized biospheres, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, is hardly mentioned.

Obtawaing Biosphere is a university project, not well known despite its international scientific research cooperation. Isle Royale National Park attracts many midwestern volunteers for its prey-predator study (see tagged moose above), but even if you ask a ranger, you’re unlikely to learn much about the site being a UNESCO Biosphere. And it took some research for me to learn that Sleeping Bear Dunes is also part of the larger global biosphere network.

Many Americans view our parks as recreation areas for workers to take vacations and spend money as tourists. That nature thrives there is taken for granted. What’s important for most is that you can exercise by climbing a dune, hiking across an island, renting a kayak or biking on a trail. If science is considered at all, it should be presented to the kids in an entertaining, limited format, where kids can learn about ‘weird’ or ‘cool’ animals.

Canada has all of that too, but they also cooperate in international scientific efforts to protect nature. Adults are encouraged to increase their scientific understanding of species too. Their Great Lake biospheres have online visiting information, campgrounds, cooperative agreements with First Nations, birding resources, museums, and both areas that are closed to the public and where the public is welcome. UNESCO is on the signs and in the exhibits.

Sadly, a few Americans believe stupid conspiracies about UNESCO, and some leaders disparaged the science group over an unrelated Israel/ Palestine dispute. As President, Trump removed 17 US Biospheres from the UN program, including Konza Prairie in Kansas. Kansas may not be demographically diverse, but its Tallgrass Prairie is ecologically important to species diversity on earth. The research at Konza used to receive international funding and cooperate with UN scientific efforts, including climate and wildfire research.

There is no logic behind stopping us from receiving funding from the UN for many of our critically important research biospheres, when we need international cooperation to fix the climate crisis. Humans impact nature, and if we’re not careful, we will irrevocably destroy much of our natural environment. Americans should learn about and celebrate our UNESCO biospheres. Please support scientific research and the environment.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park

/ bigdiff / 11 Comments

This site, one of my favorites for native ruins, is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are numerous pueblos located in the park, and the largest one pictured is actually missing a few rooms due to a rockslide from the cliff above. These great houses were several stories tall, including storerooms for trade and many ceremonial kivas. Due to the well preserved nature of the site, it’s easier to get a sense of the scale of human activity a thousand years or so ago. At other more degraded sites, you’re really looking at the small basement room foundations. Here, you can see that some of the rooms above were much larger with windows and wider passages. The road out here is miles of washboard dirt, which helps reduce human impact.

There’s an interesting display at the visitor center showing several of the other great builder civilizations around the world at the time Chaco thrived. For me the comparison that comes to mind is Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. They were also a civilization of great travelers and explorers who build large stone markers and then move on to other locations. Manmade ecological collapse contributed to the rapid population declines at these sites. Chaco no doubt boomed when it improved its agricultural yields by building a vast network of canals, but natural systems have natural limits that can break when pushed too far. Obviously, when the natural limits are pushed too far globally, the problem is that there will be nowhere to move that’s unaffected. And the crisis part of climate change is that we won’t have enough time to respond. For those unable to think more than a year or two into the future, it’s worth looking back over centuries since Chaco’s population collapsed due to over exploitation. We may think of ourselves as advanced, but we’re not (and won’t be) if we can’t avoid the coming climate catastrophe we created.