Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [13]
Thoreau disdained the ideas of progress prevalent in his day. He didn’t think the world was becoming a better place. Nature was being destroyed because humans couldn’t live simple lives but instead reached greedily after things and status. He thought local and small scale, seeing the wonder of creation in just about any natural system. Over time, Thoreau’s philosophy has deeply informed many variants of environmentalism: Conserve, be self-reliant, think local.
Thoreau habitually observed the plants and animals near Concord with scientific rigor. He sought to “know the species of every twig and leaf ” in the area. In particular, he began to study “when plants first blossomed and leafed.” Year after year he ran to “different sides of town and into neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day.” He “often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times in a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened,” he recorded in his journal. Meticulously, he input these observations into a chart from 1852–1858.14
His observations eventually became one of the best records available to phenologists, or contemporary scientists who study seasonal changes. A once sleepy field, in the context of studying climate change it’s taken on new importance because plants are remarkably sensitive to small temperature change. In fact, in 2008 a team of scientists took Thoreau’s record and went out to Concord to see how things had changed. Because 60 percent of the region is protected from development, it formed an excellent case study in how climate change alone could impact a set of flowers.
The results, published in the journals Ecology and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science were stunning. 15 Although it’s been only 150 years since his stint at Walden Pond, over that time the average temperature around Walden has risen four degrees. This change has altered when the seasons begin and end. The plants that can adjust their flowering cycles easily are surviving, but a bunch of others are dying. The highbush blueberries that Thoreau picked during September at Walden Pond are now flowering twenty-one days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day; they are doing fine. Others, however, are not. More than a quarter of the region’s flowers are gone because of climate change, and another 36 percent are in imminent danger of dying out.
All that destruction has been caused by a slight build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. There, the carbon dioxide traps more heat from the sun and the planet warms up. Coal plants in China, cars in Caracas, land use changes in Brazil, corn farms in Iowa—all of these things contribute to deranging the atmosphere. A molecule of CO2 released counts equally, no matter if it happens in the middle of the Amazon or in downtown Detroit. The researchers who studied the changes around Concord concluded, “Given that climate-influenced loss of phylodiversity has been so great in Concord, despite 60 percent of the area being well protected or undeveloped since the time of Thoreau, a more global approach to conservation prioritization is necessary to minimize future species loss.”16
Although Thoreau found it silly that Etzler would try to “prescribe for the globe itself,” today there is no other way forward to stave off climate change and the attendant warping of every single local ecosystem, no matter how the locals might care for and coddle it. Here’s what climate change means: The global