Bert Gildart

Many Everglades visitors experience this unique national park by traveling along the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway. During a ten-day canoe trip through the largest mangrove ecosystem in the western hemisphere, I saw crocodiles, alligators, and “super colonies” of wading birds. One hundred years from now, such an experience may be impossible. The waterway is about three feet above sea level, and thermal expansion of oceans due to global warming could raise water levels several feet by the end of the century.

Of course, the natural world is always evolving. Global warming, however, is threatening profound changes. Though our 702 wilderness areas are “protected,” every one of them—and their wildlife—will be affected by the relatively rapid changes in global climate brought on by humans’ excessive emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Scientists cannot say with certainty what our wilderness areas will be like in a century, but they can offer informed speculation.

In the other corner of the continent, at Washington’s Mount Rainier Wilderness, Emmons Glacier, the largest in the continental United States, has receded by one mile. Montana’s Glacier National Park has 27 glaciers, but U.S. Geological Survey scientist Dr. Dan Fagre says that by the year 2030 all of them probably will be gone.

Rebecca Anderson, a Mount Rainier naturalist, notes that by 2040 the Northwest expects a five-degree temperature increase, which will force the park’s alpine community to move up 1,500 feet. U.S. Forest Service Biologist Tom Kogut sees that happening in the Tatoosh Wilderness, just south of Mount Rainier. “Expect to see fewer goats, pika, and ptarmigan,” speculates Kogut. “Elk, however, will probably benefit, because they’re more adaptable, so they’ll move into areas vacated by residents of the alpine community.”

Wilderness Society ecologist Dr. Gregory Aplet cautions that transitions can be enormously complicated. “The soils necessary to support alpine vegetation likely take decades to centuries to develop, so even if the climate is appropriate for alpine species 1500 feet higher, those species may not be able to occupy the site,” he contends. “More likely, we’ll see catastrophic mortality and slow assembly of perhaps novel communities where there are soils or an expansion of bare ground.”

In the Great Basin of Nevada and California, Dr. Erik Beever of the U.S. Geological Survey is concerned about the findings of his research. He has been working in numerous locations, including the Ruby Mountain, Arc Dome, Alta Toquina, Table Mountain, East Humboldt and other wilderness areas. He was drawn to the region a decade ago because of his interest in a small member of the rabbit family known as the pika, analogous, he says, to the canary in the coal mine.

Pika have inhabited the Great Basin for the past 40,000 years and, during 1898 to 1990, were recorded in at least 25 distinct locations. In 1994 Beever began his investigations but found evidence of pikas at only 19 locations. During 2003 to 2006, that number dropped to 17 and the minimum elevation of pikas had migrated upslope an average of about 130 vertical meters. “A hundred years from now? Yes, pika probably will be gone from the Great Basin,” he says, “because they can’t tolerate higher temperatures.”

As illustrated in the movie Arctic Tales, the most dramatic changes in our country are occurring in Alaska’s wilderness. Polar bears are struggling to find firm ice on which to clamber and hunt for the seals that provide most of their food. Farther south, in the Wrangell-St. Elias Wilderness, spruce bark beetles have attacked spruce across 2.3 million acres, giving vast forests a gray, skeletal appearance. Warmer conditions have allowed insects to thrive when cooler summers and colder winters would have normally held them in check.

The Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness of North Carolina and Tennessee preserves virgin forests of yellow pine, oak, beech, and hemlock. But an exotic aphid known as the wooly adelgid is killing hemlocks. Normally, the ecosystem might respond by growing birch and maple to replace the hemlocks. But because of rapid temperature increases, brush, grasses, and shrubs might grow instead.

Warmer weather in New England is likely to change flora and fauna in that region’s 17 wilderness areas. Dr. Richard Birdsey of the U.S. Forest Service conjectures that places such as the Presidential Range-Dry River Wilderness of New Hampshire—now characterized by spruce and fir—will change over the course of the next 100 years. “All that could be replaced by hardwoods,” says Birdsey.

In the West, changes may be more rapid. Scientists have discovered that the Joshua tree is declining in Malpais Mesa Wilderness (adjacent to Death Valley, California) and in the Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness. Joe Zarki, chief naturalist at Joshua Tree National Park, describes the tree as a relic of past climatic conditions, a species that demands specific temperature and water conditions. “It doesn’t like months where the mean temperature exceeds 100° Fahrenheit,” says Zarki. “One hundred years from now, we’re expecting this keystone species will be gone, and that could displace some wildlife.”

But is it all inevitable? The good news, according to Dr. Jerry Franklin, professor of ecosystem science at the University of Washington and winner of the prestigious Heinz Award, is that our wilderness areas and other national lands could help forestall global warming. “The potential for the sequestration of carbon in old-growth forests is immense,” says Franklin, a long-time member of The Wilderness Society’s Governing Council. “No other ecosystem in the world can store as much carbon as do these forests, and it’s a capacity they have not yet begun to reach.” He says other national lands and wilderness areas that protect boreal forests, tundra, and wetlands are also vital in diminishing greenhouse gases, but to be most effective they should be “big, varied, and wild.”

Today the nation’s forests are capturing an estimated ten percent of the carbon that the U.S. is releasing through fossil fuel burning. This amount could be increased significantly through adoption of the right policies, including protection of existing forests from development, restoration of deforested or degraded lands, and forest management geared toward increasing carbon stores. The Pacific Forest Trust estimates that 25 tons of carbon are emitted for every forest acre that is developed. With the U.S. Forest Service predicting that more than 40 million acres of forest will be developed by 2030, more funds are needed to conserve forests.

Dr. Clarence Lehman, an adjunct professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota, says that his research has shown that each acre of pine forest can offset carbon emissions produced by a car—and can do so for the life of the person driving a vehicle. Lehman, who has done most of this research in wilderness areas, adds, “Thoreau’s classic statement ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world’ really holds true here.”

Dr. Wendy Loya, a Wilderness Society ecologist in Alaska who has written extensively on climate change, points out that wilderness areas and other public lands also help by providing a refuge for species to adapt to the stress caused by rapid changes in the environment. “In wilderness areas,” she says, “wildlife does not have to contend with disturbances such as development, logging, roads, and motorized traffic.”

National forests tend to feature greater biodiversity, making them more valuable than monoculture forests because a change in conditions can eliminate the single dominant species rapidly. Many of our public lands connect reserves and thus provide migration corridors that will be critical in helping species migrate up in elevation and north in latitude or inland from flooded shorelines. In contrast to small and isolated reserves, expansive areas are able to support large enough populations of species so that adaptation to changing conditions is more likely.

Land protection and restoration is only a partial solution, of course. We must take a range of steps to control greenhouse gases—and soon. The Wilderness Society is urging a mandatory, steadily declining cap on carbon emissions; greater investment in renewable energy; production of cars that go farther on a gallon of gas; and more efficient use of energy throughout our economy. We cannot dawdle, waiting to see what the year 2107 might bring.

Bert Gildart of Bigfork, Montana, is a writer/photographer whose work has appeared in Smithsonian, Travel/Holiday, National Wildlife, Field & Stream, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. Gildart is the author of 12 books.