A Brief Glance At Pope Francis' Encyclical

I’ve only had time to read about half of the Pope Francis’ Encyclical On Care For Our Common Home. Just a couple things to say from what I’ve read so far. The Encyclical is not only about climate change. It is about our entire global environmental crisis, of which global warming is only one aspect.

            I’ll have much more to say about this later, once I’ve read the whole thing and had time to digest what the Pontiff has to say. In the mean time I thought it might be good for you to take a look at what Francis says in part of the first chapter about superficial ecology, something that I run into much more than I want to. Francis says:

At the same time we can note the rise of a false or superficial ecology, which bolsters complacency and a cheerful recklessness. As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a license to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen.

Pope Francis

Mountaintop Removal Affecting Bird Populations

This is just out from the U.S. Geological Survey. Mountaintop mining is not only changing the landscape, it is, unsurprisingly, changing the ecology of the Appalachians. According to a new study published in Landscape Ecology, songbirds that thrive in forested areas are in decline in areas adjacent to reclaimed mountaintop removal mines, while birds that live in shrub lands are increasing in these areas.

            The results make sense on the face of things. Even when MTR mines are reclaimed, they are mostly large grassland areas devoid of trees. And as you can surmise, it will take a while for trees to take root, grow, and reach maturity in reclaimed mines. Most optimistically the forests will grow to maturity in the mines in a matter of a few decades, but in most cases it will probably take longer.

            Here are some details from the USGS news release:

The study evaluated the bird communities in the forest that remains around the reclaimed habitats in West Virginia and Kentucky. Researchers found that even small amounts of forest lost to mineland or grassland within a landscape resulted in lower abundance for the majority of bird species in the forest that remained adjacent to the reclaimed lands.  Declines in abundance were detected for 12 species of forest interior birds and 11 species of interior edge birds including species of conservation concern such as Cerulean Warbler and Worm-eating Warbler.  But the numbers of some species did go up.

“Some shrubland species, for example the brown thrasher and song sparrow, or forest generalist species such as the brown-headed cowbird and the yellow-throated vireo, did have a positive response to the loss of forest and the gain in mineland or grassland, but most bird species did not,” said Doug Becker, professor of biology at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and senior author of the study.  “If managers want to take actions that may benefit sensitive, forest-dependent species, they need to minimize the amount of forest lost in a landscape.”

A reclaimed mountaintop mine. No trees here. photo: ovec.org

The Cerulean Warbler, one of the bird species in decline around the mountaintop removal mines photo: nc.audubon.org

Other ecological effects have been documented, including the recent finding that the mining was threatening rare endemic crayfish. And it is needless to say that for years and decades we will be finding even more effects that mountaintop removal coal mining has had on the lives of Appalachians and the environment of their mountains.

Mountains that have not been removed for their coal, where many songbirds want to live

Global Warming: It's Not Just the Polar Bears That Are Threatened

For climate change, the poster child is the polar bear. As depicted in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth we see an animation of a tiring bear swimming in the arctic and vainly searching for the sea ice that will be its safe haven. With less and less sea ice, the environment in which the polar bear hunts its prey, the seal, it is going to prove quite difficult for this species to survive.

            The polar bear’s range extends through millions of square miles through North America, Europe, and Asia. That a species with such a large range, with thousands of individuals, could be threatened by climate change is a tragedy.

            The greater tragedy is that the polar bear is only one of the wonderful creatures whose existence is threatened by a warmer world. National Geographic shows us thousands upon thousand of walruses crowded together on an island, a sight that is growing more common as northern sea is reduced by global warming. Because the walrus habitat is literally melting away, their numbers are in decline. Under the Endangered Species Act the species is listed as threatened and soon may be listed as endangered.

            The resulting crowding from the loss of habitat further exacerbates the plight of the Pacific walrus. Animals that get frightened by something like a helicopter could start a stampede, crushing other walruses. Close proximity to other individuals can also lead to diseases being spread more quickly and easily.

            There has also been a die-off of moose in North America, and global warming may be a big piece of the puzzle behind this phenomenon. In New Hampshire a longer fall season and less snow in the winter has lead to an increase in the number of winter ticks. These parasites can seriously affect the health of a moose. Some of the large mammals can be plagued with as many as 100,000 ticks. The moose can loose so much blood that they become anemic. Moose are not adapted to dealing with such heavy tick populations. They scratch the ticks and can tear off large patches of hair. With the hair loss moose can experience hypothermia when it rains in the spring.

            On the other hand, winters are warmer and shorter across the range of the moose. This warmth may be contributing to the moose mortality. Being adapted to the cold, they expend extra energy to stay cool in the warmer weather, which exhausts the animals and can lead to death.

            Scientists are still looking into other factors, such as hunting and the presence of wolves that may be leading to the decline of the moose.

Scientists Discover That Mountaintop Removal Is Bad For Fish

One of the best things you can do in West Virginia is fish. I did some as a little boy, catching mostly bluegill in a lake not far from our home in Anmoore, West Virginia, and my uncle went often up to Elkins for some great fishing up around that area. Mountaintop removal, however, could be removing those fish from the rivers and streams of Appalachia.

            A new study[i] from the peer-reviewed journal Ecology of Freshwater Fish finds that mountaintop removal threatens the fish in the stream of Appalachia. Robert L. Hopkins, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rio Grande, and Jordan C. Roush of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, studied the effects that mountaintop mining had on six different fish species that live in different stream ecologies in eastern Kentucky. Unsurprisingly, the scientists found that populations of four of the species were negatively affected by the existence of mountaintop removal in their streams’ watershed. Perhaps surprisingly, the study found that the effect of mountaintop removal was less dependent on the overall acreage of land destroyed by mountaintop mining in a watershed and was affected more by how large the individual mining operations were.

            Effects of Mountaintop Mining on Fish Distributions in Central Appalachia has just been published, so I only have access to the abstract. I don’t even know what kinds of fish or which watersheds were included were in the study. I will update this post as I learn more.

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[i] Hopkins, Robert L., and Jordan C. Roush. "Effects Of Mountaintop Mining On Fish Distributions In Central Appalachia." Ecology Of Freshwater Fish 22.4 (2013): 578-586. Environment Complete. Web. 27 Sept. 2013.