The Continuum
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A photo on Facebook taken four years ago shows a beautiful and tall Yellow Lady’ s Slipper orchid. In the background are tall trees nearly leaved out and almost an entire green canopy overhead. The photo was taken in Brown County State Park along a road that I never recall having orchids. A few years ago a Bloomington friend and her companion who like to look for them in bloom showed me the flower location on a park map and said to watch for them. I looked and was excited to see such a lush growth, all appearing healthy.
Why? If you know anything about the park and its deer dilemma, wildflowers, grasses, and ferns had disappeared from the forest floor when deer numbers peaked. So absent from the park’ s herbal layer were they that a few years in the mid 1980s the popular Wildflower Foray, an annual event now in its 35 th year, did not offer any public wildflower walks in the park. To have them return allowing rare orchids and other forest herbals to recover proved the controversial deer hunts were the right thing to do.
I wondered to friends why the forest scene in the photo isn’ t anything like the conditions we have now, four years later. There is now hardly any greenery on the forest floor and trees are a long way from fully leaving out. Why such a difference in so short a time?
My interest as a biologist in global effects, changing plant and animal conditions, and trendwatching has been little help in this inquiry. I am reminded that globally we are warming, due to among other things, carbon dioxide build-up and a layer over the planet preventing heat escape. Changes are reported by scientists worldwide who watch for responses. But the photo does not help confirm for me that climate change is happening, and happening here. If we were warming, wouldn’ t current conditions show more plant growth and more leafed-out canopy today compared to the conditions four years ago? Science is helping us understand that while conditions worldwide are changing, the total effect isn’ t always increased temperatures. Prolonged cold, raging winter storms, with deep snow and ice lasting for months in different and in some new parts of the country hardly convince global change skeptics things by Jim Eagleman
are getting warmer.“ Global warming, my foot”, yells a neighbor as we both shovel our walks from a freakish winter storm.
Weather scientists point out that conditions are gradually changing— fronts that bring these drastic weather conditions were not reported as occurring in recent time. Extremes in weather will be the norm we are told. Rising shoreline water is only one condition we will be confronted with as fluctuations continue. A bumper sticker helps me see the big picture:“ It’ s not global warming, Friend, it’ s climate change!” Melting ice caps, time-lapse photos of glacier demise, and polar bears on shrinking icebergs are impressive while scenes of wind storms and regional flooding don’ t hold our attention as much, but are as just as telltale. Not a doomsday predictor, rather a respected scientist, my friend told me,“ These are exciting times to be alive!”
And like the orchid that adapted and survived in my photo after over-browsing by hungry deer, he claims adjustments in the life of a plant or animal determine whether they and their kind will be around.“ But let’ s face it, weather has a lot to do with it,” he said.
Nature term:( German) WALDEINSAMKEIT— A feeling of solitude, being alone in the woods and a feeling of connectedness to nature. •