Wildlife Biology and Climate Change

For years, I have wanted to pursue a career in wildlife biology and conservation. I love nature and wildlife so much that I have a hard time calling my future in this field a "career", because it is truly more like a dream come true. However, that dream is fading and I watch my future slowly disappear as climate change is taking a hold of our planet. With the pace at which climate change is occurring, my objects of study are disappearing and dying and this is not okay with me nor should it be with anyone else.

With the effects of climate change biomes will disappear, current biomes will shift in geographic location along with every single living thing that exists in each biome. Species will suffer due to habitat loss and limited resources. This just absolutely breaks my heart as someone who is so in love with wildlife and hopes to study it for the entirety of the rest of my life. Recently, The Wildlife Society dicussed climate change and adaptation as one of their Hot Issues and included it in their Policy Priorities. Some more of their Policy Priorities include Endangered Species Recovery, Strategic Conservation Planning and Energy Development and Wildlife.

In my future as a wildlife biologist I hope to be able to enjoy the environment I'm working in and help spread awareness of climate change. Being a working person in that field it will be vital to my work to educate others in the public on the importance of protecting, preserving, and conserving the beauty and health of our planet.

Future Coast

Future Coast is an online resource to get an audible look into our future as climate change continues to impact our every day lives. Each voicemail has a specific subject matter, whether it is food, air, water, activity, etc and each voicemail has a different character each with a life that is impacted in a different way by climate change. Each voicemail also takes place in a different year in the future, some being as soon as 2020 and some as late as 2065.

Some of the voicemails are very realistic visions of our possible future an a little scary. For example, a voicemail called Lobster Order is Cancelled is the voice of a man who ordered lobster, his wife's favorite food, from a seafood company five years ago, however they had to cancel his order because they did not have a big enough supply of lobster for everyone who was on the waiting list.

Another voicemail called Grab Some Fresh Air is not so believable. A wife asks her husband to stop at the store to pick up a bottle of fresh air because she had forgotten. I just don't believe we will be bottling or will even need to be bottling "fresh air" by the 2050's.

 Future Coast is a very easily accessible activity, however not so much a game. Perhaps a way to use it in a classroom is to have students pick a few voicemails that really stand out to them and then have them write and analysis about the few they selected. They may choose to express how it made them feel or even cause them to do research to discover how realistic the voicemail might actually be. All in all, Future Coast is not really a game, but just an activity.

Carbon Diaries 2015

The Carbon Diaries 2015, written by author Saci Lloyd, is a young adult novel following the life of Laura Brown, a teenager, and her family. They live in Britain in 2015, a time where climate change has taken such a toll in their country that everyone is forced to ration their carbon usage. Citizens must choose between a hot shower or an hour of computer usage. They must decide if their imported food is worth their well cultures diets. People are forced to prioritize acceptable reasons to use the car. Amongst all of this stress on the people of London, main character Laura finds herself dealing with a sister with a major attitude problem, the desire to lead her nu-punk band to fame, a gorgeous boy nextdoor whom she desires to song, and drama between her parents caused by the recent restrictions on carbon usage. I'm not really one for a fictional read about a young romance and amateur band mates trying to make it big time, but the importance of climate change that this book recognizes is hard to ignore and not appreciate. The Climate Diaries 2015 is an interesting, relatable way to think about climate change.

The Carbon Diaries 2015 really got me thinking about the possibility of this "carbon rationing" thing becoming a reality. Would this be a realistic solution to limiting global emissions? And what would be the results on the economy? I am no economist, however it would be interesting to see if local farmers and businesses would become more successful and what effects it would have on larger cooporations. I found an interesting article on carbon rationing and coincidentally enough it is written through an online webpage from the UK. Europe is a place expected to see exceptional species loss  (both plants and animals) in the coming century due to climate change, especially considering the montanous regions where it is incredibly difficult for species to relocate due to geographical barriers, so it may make sense for a place like the UK to be bringing up the idea of carbon rationing as a temporary solution to climate change. I do not think it is an appropriate long term solution, because it is not sustainable. Eventually we must convert our energy supply over to 100% renewable resources such as wind, solar, and hydro power. However, even hydro power is becoming a questionable renewable resource because of numerous recent droughts found around the globe due to the effects of climate change. In the meantime, we can only hope our policy makers will have the courage and determination to make to serious decisions about our carbon and fossil fuel emissions. Someone must invoke a change in our communities around the world and sometimes that can happen just by spreading word and information.

If you're interested in finding out more about biodiversity loss, check out this site explaining the triggers and results of moving and disappearing species.

Turtle Island

I have never been the type of person who necessarily understood and enjoyed poetry. Gary Snyder's book Turtle Island is a composition of multiple essays and poems expressing his thoughts on interactions between humans and the natural world. His works are interesting, focusing on every living being's contribution to the biological and cultural path of life. Some poems were more straightforward and focused on political issues involving humankind's place in nature and some poems were more abstract and hard to understand what his exact message was. Perhaps that's the point of more abstract poetry? Maybe the specific messages are up to the interpretation of the reader. His poems also varied in topic: some were focused on destruction of life and some focused on the cultural aspects of life.

A poem that centered on the destruction of life that I came across called "The Dead by the Side of the Road," detailed the process in which humans use roadkill and hunted animals for resources. A quote, "Fawn stew on Hallowe'en hit by a truck on highway forty-nine offer cornmeal by the mouth; skin it out... Pray to their spirits. Ask them to bless us: our ancient sisters' trails the roads were laid across and kill them: night-shining eyes The dead by the side of the road." A poem I thought to be powerful, referencing our infrastructure's deadliness and ancestors practices.


A poem that I found to be a bit more culturally relevant was called "Anasazi." I looked up what Anasazi meant and the direct translation I found was "Ancient Ones." The Anasazi are thought to be the ancestors of the modern Pueblo Indians and were located on the Four Corners country of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. Snyder seemed to reference native cultures a lot throughout the collection. I quiet enjoyed this quote from "Anazasi," "you eyes full of pollen the smell of bats. the flavor of sandstone grit on the tongue. women birthing at the foot of ladders in the dark. trickling streams in hidden canyons under the cold rolling desert." I really love the visuals, sounds, and smells that this poem created; It was a great reminder of where our country came from and how humans thrived before current technologies.

Meat The Truth

I must say it was interesting reading Comfortably Unaware by Dr. Richard Oppenlander and then watching Meat The Truth. I purposefully chose to watch Meat The Truth because I had read Comfortably Unaware and I was curious how they would compare.Both the book and documentary are about the impacts of livestock production and consumption, however Comfortably Unaware focused on both environmental impacts of meat production as well as the negative health effects consuming meat has on the human body. Meat The Truth mainly focused on just the environmental impacts. The movie was released in 2008 whereas the book was published in 2012 so the book has more updated statistics, which have only increased.

There were two main focuses I noticed in Meat The Truth: The amount of land used to raise and feed livestock and its impacts on the environment and the inhumane treatment of animals and employees. All of the statistics are mind blowing and there are so many I could never list them all in just one post. One comparison I will give you to give you a sense of how much pollution livestock create is that one cow creates more pollution than a car that has driven 70 billion km. And it's not just the animals themselves destroying our planet with their waste and methane emissions. The masses of land required to put the livestock on and grow crops to feed the livestock is mind blowing. Our rainforests are being completely depleted due to deforestation for the maintenance of livestock and livestock crops. By cutting down our forests we are losing carbon sponges and emitting more carbon only making our problems worse. The graphs above show that the countries that consume the least amount of meat are sacrificing the most amount of land solely for the production of livestock, which is a devastating concept and example of how corrupt our industries can be.

Although the inhumane treatment of animals and employees doesn't have much to do with pollution it was still important to address in the film. A lot of farms are owned by large coorporations and the farmers have little to no say of what goes on on their farms. Farmers often don't get paid enough to make a comfortable living for the work they do. Chicks are debeaked so they don't have the risk of pecking each other. Piglets are castrated with no anasthetic and I could go on

Meat The Truth was a lot of the same information from Comfortably Unaware and then some. It was nice getting another perspective on the destruction that our livestock industry is causing.

Eating Our Future Away

Imagine taking your very first bite into that big, juicy quarter pounder with extra bacon on it and gooey, melty cheddar cheese. Now please consider that the burger you just bit into cost the planet 55 square feet of rainforest, and no, I am not kidding. Do you feel guilty yet? I know I do.

After reading the beginning of Comfortably Unaware by Dr. Richard Oppenlander my eyes were opened wide. I had already been educated on the effects of livestock production, but because in our world today our food industry is so tied into economics, politics and culture that I completely forgot just how devastating the effects are and that's exactly what these people want to happen. That's why no one knows that livestock production produces more emissions than all car, train, bus, and plane emissions combined. It's why no one knows that we raise, feed, water, kill and eat over 70 billion animals a year; that's more than 10 times the amount of people we have on this planet!!! It's why no one knows that it takes over 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat, which by the way is starting to become a non-renewable resource due to the over consumption of water and climate change causing droughts all across the globe. These facts and statistics are only a mere glimpse at what this book contains factually. 

I am only a quarter of the way into the book and want to become vegetarian. Becoming vegetarian is one way a single person can make a HUGE difference in our planet's current climate crisis. You think there's nothing you can do alone to change this situation? WRONG. Stop consuming animals. Save 5,000 gallons of water. Prevent that 55 square foot plot of rainforest from being slashed and burned. Stop depleting our world's resources because soon enough there won't be any left for humans. I found one quote from the book that explains the importance of reducing livestock production: "On any given acre of land we can grow twelve to twenty times the amount in pounds of edible vegetables, fruit, and grain as in pounds of edible animal products. We are essentially using twenty times the amount of land and crops and hundreds of times the water, as well as polluting our waterways and air and destroying rain forests, to produce animals to kill and eat." (Oppenlander, 24)I don't know about you but just hearing how much damage one person can do to our planet through the consumption of animals and animal products is enough for me to highly consider being vegetarian.

Atmospheric CO2

Our planet's biggest cause for climate change is the emission of greenhouse gases and burning of fossil fuels. In 1958, NASA created the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii to observe and monitor the atmospheric carbon dioxide contents. The tools in the observatory and many other resources found that we are now at a level above 400ppm, far exceeding the allowed 350ppm for a safe planet. The average yearly increase in carbon dioxide has risen from 1.55ppm to 2.75ppm and we have gone up 85ppm in 55 years.

To get an idea of what we use fossil fuels for or what they are, the components of a 42 gallon barrel of oil are broken up as such - 44.9% vehicle gasoline, 29.8% heating oil and diesel fuel, 20.5% other materials (chemical manufacturing, synthetic rubbers and plastics), 9.5% jet fuel, 2.0% asphalt. We need to keep our carbon budget to 565 gigatonnes or 72ppm. In order to achieve this we need to keep 4/5 of our known, available coal, oil and reserves untouched; that's 2,795 gigatonnes or 378ppm. This will not come easy.

 

The Paris Agreement is already in place to establish a warming cap at 1.5C-2C, however this is merely a guideline or suggestion. Countries need to actually start doing something. Things that need immediate action to reduce our fossil fuel emissions include invest in renewable energy sources, improve vehicle fuel efficiency, place limits on allowed carbon emissions by big polluters, reduce, tropical deforestation, build a clean energy economy.

"Scary scorecard: catastrophic climate change 400, humanity zero. Listen to the scientists, vote wisely, beat carbon addiction and put humanity into the game.”

-Dr. William Patzert

Reseach Oceanographer