Note: This story is intended to be listened to. Text associated below is simply a transcript of the audio.
I’ve been thinking about human-caused climate change and what it means to be resilient in the face of it. Sometimes we aren’t able to see those changes on the planet, but we do feel the effects. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming to notice those effects, but maybe we don’t know how well we can adapt. Or can we even adapt?
Sometimes our impact leaves scars on the land, and sometimes it does not. Some of the scars can be hard to read. They’re too subtle, like early blooms, or like shifts in bird song. Other scars? They remain painfully, visually obvious for a long, long time.
Satellite imagery shows the impacts of out-of-control wildfires in California, most recently by the Mountain Fire, which forced thousands of people to flee and destroyed at least 170 structures. Within days and weeks, those landscapes smolder and look charred. For years to come, that burnt soil will struggle to nourish old trees; the land will be prone to flooding. Not finding food and shelter, a lot of wildlife may stay away.
We humans have been leaving our imprint on the planet since our hunter-gathering days.
BBC: “This is Bingham mine. It produces enough ore each year to rewire every home in the USA and Mexico.”
The BBC documentary, This Is How Humans Have Changed the World, features one human activity that’s left a visible mark: mining. The Bingham Mine in Utah, or the Kennecott Copper Mine, as the locals know it, is the largest in the world. From above, it’s an incredible sight: The pit is wide and deep, as deep underground as the 10,000-foot-tall Oquirrh Mountains around it rise up towards the sky.
BBC: “The size of Bingham Canyon Mine continues to expand all the time. Today we’re about 2 1/2 miles wide at our widest point, and we’re nearly a mile deep at our deepest point. As we get bigger, we move back in about 1,000-foot cuts. Those thousand-foot cuts will take us seven years to get to ore. And we’ll continue to mine ore after that to produce the copper that we need.”
It is hard to imagine what those Oquirrh Mountains, with their canyons and dense forests, would have looked like before mining started there in the late 1800s.
About six years ago, I set out to try to understand the effects of humans’ impact on a micro level in a little corner of Los Angeles, California.
I walked by the edge of the Los Angeles River, close to downtown, next to Travis Longcore, a historical ecologist who teaches at the University of Southern California and who has done research on species that do well in spite of — or perhaps because of — human disturbance.
Travis encouraged me to think of even the densest, most built-out environments, as places where nature can thrive. Think coyotes. And pollinator gardens in the middle of the city.
Longcore: “And, so I’m walking along here, and of course, you know … deerweed, right? Deerweed is a great butterfly food plant. And, in fact, the Palos Verde blue butterfly, which is one of the ones we work on down in Palos Verdes, on a military installation — that’s at the brink of extinction, because we’ve kind of protected it too well. It’s a fuel depot. And they’re like, ‘Hands off, hands off.’ And we’re like, ‘No, we have to disturb more.’ And you come to a place like this, and you’re reminded that this … and there’s a spring butterfly that’s associated with this plant here … this is a disturbance-loving plant; it’s a disturbance-following plant. It’s short-lived; it’s a native plant of the chaparral and coastal sage scrub, and it thrives here because it’s a disturbed site. And there’s a couple other things as you look around — there’s coyote brush, and there’s mule fat and what not, which are these, kind of, bullet-proof, you know, plants of the river terraces.
“Mule fat scrub, it’s just like: They’re here, right on the site. It’s one of the first things that I see when I come out here.”
Mule fat scrub is native to the entire West Coast, from Oregon all the way down to Baja in Mexico. It has these clusters of tiny white fuzzy flowers that bloom around July, attracting bees, butterflies and other pollinators.
It’s hard to say how long those plants have been growing by the LA River, but we know no one’s planted them. No one waters them. … And it’s fair to assume they’ve been around this area for centuries and will be in the future, too. Despite the disturbance. Because of the disturbance. Because nature has shown it has a way of finding a way, of bouncing back, if we only give it a little space.
We can’t unsee many of these changes. They are no small disturbance.
But we’re still at a point in our history on this planet, where, with a lot of imagination, we can picture a future where our impacts get even just a little bit lighter. Nature itself — how it heals and adapts and shifts — is probably our best teacher.
“Encounters” is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.
