For The Wild - COREY LESK on Warming Winters and Southern Pine Beetle Migration ⧸136

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00:00:23.640 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast.

00:00:26.480 I'm Ayanna Young.

00:00:30.000 I think it's up to us to not be paralyzed by this.

00:00:34.940 I think it's up to us to be, especially people who are in the high-consuming parts of the world

00:00:39.180 that are really responsible for this, to not be paralyzed.

00:00:42.080 I have to say we need to do the work that's really ours to do to move through this.

00:00:49.960 Today we are speaking with Corey Lesk.

00:00:52.460 Corey is a Ph.D. student in earth and environmental science at Columbia University in New York.

00:00:57.640 He worked on the implications of extreme weather and climate change on ecosystems and global food production.

00:01:05.140 Recently, he published research on southern pine beetle expansion into the north due to warming winters.

00:01:12.000 Corey spends summers paddling in the boreal forest of Iyuchi and Mastuyash territories in so-called northern Quebec

00:01:20.320 as means to work on a more immediate and personal relationship with the ecosystems that are otherwise

00:01:26.560 reduced to scientific equation in his field. Well, hello, Corey, and welcome to For the Wild,

00:01:33.600 and thank you so much for joining us today. And I just wanted to say that in preparing for this

00:01:38.780 interview, it has become really clear that the expansion of the southern pine beetle is a

00:01:45.180 manifestation of our consumptive culture, a culture that we have been born into and yet have

00:01:52.140 failed to dismantle the myths of, to, you know, really address so many of these avoidable impacts.

00:01:58.980 You know, instead, many of us have gotten distracted by the promises of development,

00:02:03.920 technology, and science. But it seems to me that the Southern pine beetles migration

00:02:09.200 is a reminder that what we have yet set in motion cannot simply be stopped.

00:02:15.180 So I really look forward to this conversation with you on the effects of warming winters on pine forest and the implications of southern pine beetle expansion.

00:02:24.860 Great. I'm looking forward to it.

00:02:26.640 So I know that the southern pine beetle is native to Central America and the southeastern U.S., but over the past decade, these beetles have been spotted throughout the northeast.

00:02:37.920 It's been predicted that they will appear in Nova Scotia by 2020 and southern New England and Wisconsin by 2060 and other parts of Canada by 2080.

00:02:48.620 So can you begin just by telling us what changes you are seeing in southern pine beetle expansion due to warming winters and how did they get to where they are now?

00:03:00.220 You know, what areas are predicted to become climactically hospitable to these beetles by the end of the century?

00:03:06.440 The southern pine beetle is native to the southern United States and never really made

00:03:11.740 it up to the northern United States.

00:03:13.760 It's a big pest in the southern United States.

00:03:15.920 They grow a lot of pine down there and very heavily managed forest for timber.

00:03:21.620 And it's been just a regular part of the disturbance regime down there, wiping out

00:03:26.540 the forest every now and then.

00:03:28.220 But since around 2000, it started moving north and made it into New Jersey for the first

00:03:34.180 time and got very established there and has been a problem in southern New Jersey ever since. The

00:03:40.880 forest down there are these coastal kind of sandy stunted pitch pines. It's a very iconic landscape

00:03:47.120 for people from New Jersey and people from the east coast in general in the United States and

00:03:52.780 it just causes pockets of devastation that gradually expand. You know it's these things

00:04:00.300 have never been part of this landscape before in the popular memory of this landscape, and now

00:04:05.100 they're a persistent problem. And then since 2002, actually in 2015, the southern pine beetle

00:04:13.040 appeared on Long Island for the first time and was infesting red pines out there, and since then

00:04:22.700 moved north into Connecticut and Massachusetts, where there are some sort of stable populations

00:04:27.740 up there. So people were puzzled by why this beetle was dispersing up into these places that

00:04:35.520 get these cold winter extremes that don't happen in the south. And the connection has long been

00:04:41.220 hypothesized between the ability of this insect to survive and the cold climates of the north,

00:04:47.980 especially the really cold winter nights. And so kind of what we wanted to do in this project was

00:04:53.420 to examine that relationship and see if we could use kind of the spatial information in Southern

00:05:00.400 Pine Beetles' northward march and the changing winter cold extremes and see if we could make a

00:05:08.800 projection about whether these little beetles would continue to move further north. I know

00:05:15.700 that Southern Pine Beetles have been labeled, quote, the most destructive insect pest of their

00:05:21.260 forest that was quoted by the usda forest service so i'm wondering if you can elaborate more on their

00:05:27.840 so-called destructive behavior because i know that these beetles have been responsible for an

00:05:32.920 estimated 1.7 billion dollar loss in timber from 1990 to 2004 but this of course is just an economic

00:05:40.860 quantification you know it's reflective of society's tendency to reduce nature to natural

00:05:46.300 resource. So really, how serious is pine beetle expansion and migration to the totality of the

00:05:53.020 forest ecosystem and community, you know, outside of the timber industry? And what exactly does the

00:05:59.580 southern pine beetle do to pine trees? Southern pine beetle is an eruptive insect. So it's not

00:06:08.220 always around in a problematic or devastating quantity. Sometimes for reasons that are not

00:06:14.380 fully understand and probably partly coupled to the to the weather and climate variability

00:06:19.340 they just produce a ton of successful offspring and those offspring devastate the trees so the

00:06:26.740 way that they reproduce is they burrow under the bark of pine trees they're generalists among most

00:06:33.380 pine species and then they lay their eggs under there and the larvae hatch and they spend the

00:06:39.580 winter under there and then in the spring the larvae grow and mature and then they chew their

00:06:46.940 way out through the tree and fly onto the next tree and their ability to attack a tree really

00:06:53.300 depends on the quantity that's around so they they get into these eruptive phases of their

00:06:58.860 population and then in those phases they can cause you know near total mortality over patches that

00:07:05.740 are a kilometer or more in size. And then the patches will occur across the landscape in

00:07:12.340 varying densities. And when you have trees dying on the landscape, and that has all kinds of

00:07:18.960 consequences, for one thing, other trees are going to start to grow into their place and they won't

00:07:23.880 necessarily be the same trees. Usually you'll get successional species rather than the pines that

00:07:30.020 tend to be the mature trees that only come through a while after a disturbance. But before those

00:07:38.000 trees get established, you now have this kind of dead landscape where the soil is bare. There's no

00:07:44.860 leaf keeping the heavy rainstorms from washing away the soil. So there's an erosion and water

00:07:50.980 quality consequence, which obviously will affect the subsequent plant growth, affects the entire

00:07:59.200 downstream aquatic ecosystem and then also our drinking water quality and also pines don't stand

00:08:07.720 alone they're completely enmeshed in the whole ecosystem and you know there are lots of bird

00:08:12.400 species that feed on pine seeds and other small mammals as well as some endangered species of

00:08:20.820 or endemic species of butterflies and other insects so yeah as you mentioned I mean in this

00:08:27.180 paper we talk a lot about, or our upfront motivation is the timber costs. But you're

00:08:32.680 right, that's a bit of, it's a bit of the wrong thing to pay attention to here. And we can move

00:08:37.820 on to other kinds of economy. But you know, insects that depend on this forest are, they don't

00:08:43.200 necessarily have other places to go. One thing that I've thought about too, and I know there's

00:08:48.940 a lot of mixed thoughts on forest fires, and that, you know, obviously, there's a lot of fear around

00:08:56.560 forest fires, but there's also a lot of myths and misinformation around the, quote, naturalness

00:09:04.860 of forest fires. So, you know, thinking about these such large swaths of acreages that are

00:09:09.840 being affected by pine beetle, I'm thinking about these infected forests, you know, they could also

00:09:15.180 dry out and burn, which of course endangers people's property and emits large amounts of

00:09:20.660 carbon into the atmosphere. So what are your thoughts around, you know, how forest fires

00:09:25.440 interact with these dead standing trees there's some kind of link and it's debated but generally

00:09:32.280 on the east coast forest fires are much less of a problem than they are on the west coast

00:09:36.340 and that's just because it's so so much more humid out here so I think the connection is

00:09:41.980 stronger on the west coast where there is a close cousin of the southern pine beetle which is the

00:09:47.040 mountain pine beetle and that was famous in the last uh 10 years or so because it hopped the

00:09:52.680 rockies it used to be on the towards the sea from the rockies and would kind of move up and down the

00:09:59.840 slopes with harsher or milder winters but it could never make it up and over the slopes across the

00:10:07.280 summits down to the leeward side of the mountains and often to the you know vast interior boreal

00:10:13.600 forests in canada or into the montane forests and in the u.s rockies and it recently in the last 10

00:10:21.340 years jumped that boundary and has become a huge problem across a wide area where there was never

00:10:26.680 mountain pine beetle before. I don't know a lot about the connection to fire there. I wouldn't

00:10:31.340 say it's something that's considered a huge additional risk. Probably the largest factor

00:10:37.120 is the drying soil moisture and the just, you know, decadal drought that's been going on,

00:10:43.340 especially in California, where fires have been really out of control the last few years.

00:10:48.040 some kind of connection, I would say, but I don't think it's the most important

00:10:52.220 thing that's been driving them. I'm wondering about this thought of by severing these nutrient

00:10:59.360 flows, the southern pine beetles can kill their tree host within just several months. So I'm

00:11:05.940 wondering how does this shift the forest structure and how do you see forest type ranges shifting?

00:11:12.660 You know, is there a possibility that these shifts will be conducive to pine beetles? And in some ways, will climactic change empower certain species who, by luck of adaptation, are able to participate and survive great migration?

00:11:28.300 This is definitely something. I mean, there's a focus on doom generally in the climate impacts world. And it's true that there are potentially hidden resiliences and resiliences we don't pay a whole lot of attention to as we're drawn to these potential risks more, I guess.

00:11:45.660 But of course, you know, climate change creates opportunities for species as well. And, you know, it's a great opportunity for southern pine beetle to expand up the whole coast. Of course, that's not good for the pines. You mentioned what would take over the pine, how that would change the distribution. And you're completely right that there's this whole climate change going on over a century kind of timescale that's affecting the forest composition as well.

00:12:10.440 we didn't really consider that directly in our research because trees propagate across the

00:12:16.580 landscape very slowly if the seed can survive in what used to be too cold and now it is pleasantly

00:12:22.680 warm for that kind of seed well it's only going to move as far as maybe the wind can carry the

00:12:27.920 seed or gravity can carry the seed or maybe if you're lucky a squirrel will bring that seed

00:12:33.220 somewhere a bird will transport it which is not really that far maybe a few kilometers

00:12:37.580 whereas southern pine beetle has been observed to disperse on updrafts and carry itself through the

00:12:44.720 wind these things are you know the size of a pinhead basically maybe at most a millimeter

00:12:49.420 long and they're very light so they can disperse very quickly and they can get where they need to

00:12:54.020 go and really colonize it quite fast so the the time scale at which southern pine beetle dispersal

00:13:00.460 is happening is so fast that it makes the change in forest ranges across the landscape seem

00:13:07.200 relatively irrelevant, I think. As for what's going to replace the pine, we're not totally sure

00:13:14.060 what the level of devastation the southern pine beetle will bring in newly colonized areas.

00:13:20.900 The population dynamics and the interactions between species are vastly complex. The climate

00:13:27.420 system is relatively simple compared to how complex the biology and ecology are there.

00:13:32.280 and so it's possible that there will be no pine in this landscape because the southern pine beetle

00:13:38.660 will just colonize any tree and take it out and what'll take its place will be you know what's

00:13:43.580 adjacent and what can take advantage of that of those gaps that are created where there used to

00:13:47.660 be pine and that could be oak or maple or beech or it could be nothing up in in the rocky summits

00:13:54.280 of the Adirondacks the reason that there are pines around there is because those are the trees that

00:13:58.160 that can survive and there's not that much else. Definitely an open question and our landscapes

00:14:04.160 are changing and will change more from the interactions of all kinds of things in climate

00:14:09.860 change directly and climate change percolating through the vastly complicated ecology that

00:14:17.140 makes our land look the way it does. I was thinking about how regional biodiversity will

00:14:23.700 be threatened. So often when we think about the loss of biodiversity, it's attributed to intensive

00:14:30.200 land use or pollution or, you know, over-exploitation. Imagery of these large-scale destructive

00:14:36.960 forces, say in the Amazon, is evoked in our minds. But beetles, while being driven by climate change,

00:14:44.360 are, you know, just a much more inconspicuous force. Yet they are threatening butterflies and

00:14:50.640 insects and birds who rely on pine forest. And, you know, I'm thinking of this specific example

00:14:58.260 of southern pine beetles damaging coastal pitch pine forest, which support rare and threatened

00:15:03.420 ecosystems and birds that depend on pitch pine seeds for survival. And it said that pitch pine

00:15:09.840 forests are expected to face significant risks in the next 35 years. So how do you see this

00:15:15.780 cascading effect affect these forests and all the species that are growing simultaneously with the

00:15:24.740 pines? So that's an interesting question. One thing that I have been thinking about lately is

00:15:32.260 that not all ecosystems are equally vulnerable to a changing background climate. And one thing

00:15:41.040 that I think makes you more vulnerable is a small, highly adapted, localized type of ecosystem,

00:15:50.140 which is basically what the pitch pine forests are like. They exist on the sandy glacial moraine,

00:15:57.060 terminal moraine of the northern east coast of the United States before it just turns to rock

00:16:02.400 out in Maine. And those ecosystems don't really have anywhere else to go. So they can't move

00:16:09.560 north with the climate. And if they get ravaged by southern pine beetle, they'll be even less

00:16:14.560 resilient to changes in climate. And so, you know, these types of ecosystems like these,

00:16:22.220 you know, Cape Cod, pitch pine forests are things that a lot of people know very well from childhood.

00:16:27.360 These are vacation places. These are forests that are beloved. And these are the kinds of

00:16:32.300 ecosystems that I think are most at risk because they're so specific and so localized. And that's

00:16:38.680 part of what makes them charismatic but also part of what makes them vulnerable and then of course

00:16:44.280 you know localized specific types of ecosystems always or often come with their endemic

00:16:51.560 species that are equally charismatic and well known to us

00:17:08.680 All the things for which we have no further use

00:17:15.280 See the people there on Friday

00:17:19.780 At the barter fair say why babe 0.90

00:17:24.380 Couldn't I trade you this fine portrait for those shoes

00:17:33.420 And I know that I don't know you well

00:17:37.860 But holding your hand I could tell

00:17:42.380 That if I ever lost you I'd be crazy

00:17:48.820 And the sunny field is darkened by

00:17:56.400 The shadows I am harking by

00:18:01.020 Could you hold me tightly through the later days

00:18:07.340 i know the research of southern pine beetle expansion you and other scientists were part of

00:18:21.920 factored in a variety of ecological uncertainties so i'm wondering if you could elaborate which

00:18:27.540 uncertainties were accounted for and why and more specifically do you know if the beetles will be

00:18:33.340 successful in colonizing pine species they've never seen before. Will drier climates or changes

00:18:40.060 in fire regimes influence pine trees vulnerability to the beetles? There's a there's a kind of layer

00:18:45.560 cake of of pine species that dominate as you're looking at the map of the eastern half of North

00:18:51.440 America and the main species in the middle and middle north of the United States in the Appalachians

00:18:58.500 and then up the coast is pitch pine. And then north of that is red pine. And that goes across

00:19:04.240 the Great Lakes and then, you know, through the Adirondack and Green Mountains and across Maine

00:19:10.520 out to the Canadian Maritimes. And then north of that, red pine can't survive the boreal cold

00:19:16.760 of central Quebec and central Ontario. Then you get into the jack pine. And red and pitch pine

00:19:23.980 are hard pines. And that's the kind of bread and butter of southern pine beetle. It's well adapted

00:19:30.560 to hard pines, that family of pines. And so those are the ones that people who work closely with

00:19:37.140 these forests are most worried about. And one of the co-authors on this study works in his full-time

00:19:42.620 job is working on forests. He's a forest entomologist. He works on the risk that insects

00:19:47.980 posed to the United States forests, and he's assigned to the East Coast, and so he's very

00:19:55.900 interested in and works closely with Southern pine beetle, this tiny little critter, and what

00:20:02.380 he's found is that out on Long Island, which is for the most part suburban and has all kinds of

00:20:07.160 pines that were planted, even ones that aren't native, but also white pines, which are soft

00:20:12.640 pines, so from a completely different family with different kind of tissue structure and different

00:20:17.880 physiology, the southern pine beetle seems to have absolutely no problem becoming established

00:20:23.040 in those species. But of course, this has only been going on since 2015. So, you know, it's hard

00:20:29.380 to say whether they'll be able to really continue to reproduce in and expand from and infest new

00:20:36.300 white pines or other, you know, different types of pine families that exist in the north.

00:20:41.800 And then when you get into the boreal forest, north of the red pine zone, where jack pine is

00:20:46.360 dominant. We still haven't really observed any infestations there because it's a long ways off.

00:20:52.080 But our model projects that these areas would be suitable for southern pine beetle between around

00:20:57.460 2050 and 2080. This is a huge problem in climate impacts on ecosystems is we know so little about

00:21:04.800 how this complex relationship between climate and ecosystem really functions, especially on

00:21:10.900 specific assemblages of species, and we know even less about how they respond to a long-term change

00:21:18.260 in climate because we've never observed it before. This is not something that we have hundreds of

00:21:22.580 years of science to go on. This is something that's happening day by day, and that makes it

00:21:27.580 so difficult to study. The data is so sparse, and the changes are so complex and interacting.

00:21:33.220 So yes, there are very big uncertainties in terms of the ecological impact, but there are also

00:21:40.020 uncertainties and on purely on the climate side we we tried to for the purpose of helping people

00:21:45.960 who work with these forests understand where this uncertainty and climate projections is coming from

00:21:50.920 we tried to parse out what our climate models were saying and the the the uncertainty there

00:21:57.180 into its different sources so there are the way that the people do climate projections

00:22:05.180 is to use a suite of different climate models.

00:22:09.140 These climate models are these giant computer programs.

00:22:12.140 There are millions of lines of code,

00:22:14.280 and they just simulate everything going on in the oceans,

00:22:18.200 in the atmosphere, at the land surface,

00:22:20.180 with the sun coming in and heat going out from the Earth's surface

00:22:23.360 and all of the turbulence and all of the winds and currents.

00:22:28.560 And this is a huge project,

00:22:30.640 and different teams from all over the world have built models.

00:22:34.400 And they all simulate the climate slightly differently. And when we're talking about human-induced climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, the way that we put that into the model is to use emission scenarios.

00:22:48.840 And these basically say, you know, do we think that we're going to continue to burn tons of fossil fuels at a growing rate off into the future?

00:22:57.680 Or are we going to radically mitigate climate emissions or greenhouse gas emissions in the near future or maybe something in between?

00:23:07.180 And so when you run 20 different climate models with four different climate scenarios, you get a range of different answers.

00:23:15.740 And that's part of the uncertainty that we wanted to parse out.

00:23:20.720 And it's important to understand where that uncertainty is coming from if you're trying

00:23:24.440 to make decisions for the long term, if you're managing an attractive forest in the United

00:23:29.840 States, for instance.

00:23:31.120 Because when it comes to the greenhouse gas emission scenarios, you can make an informed

00:23:37.940 guess on what you think is going to happen in terms of our trajectory into the future.

00:23:42.280 You can also update your expectation, as you know, there are things like the Paris Climate Conference with the intentions to reduce emissions coming from national governments.

00:23:55.780 And then the differences between climate models kind of represents the state of the science, the representation of the physics and how that evolves over time.

00:24:04.720 So it gives you a kind of basis for saying, how sure are we about what parts of this kind of predict and, you know, how much do I want to plan for this uncertainty? And to what degree can I expect this uncertainty to be reduced into the future? So yeah, full of uncertainty. This is a really complicated game. And, you know, we've used fairly blunt instruments and we've done what we can do at present. And the errors are reported in the paper.

00:24:31.500 Yeah, I was speaking with Dr. William Lawrence, and he is studying old growth tree die offs, mainly in the Amazon. And a lot of our conversation was actually around the uncertainty. And I'm really I don't want to say glad that you brought it up.

00:24:48.380 But in a sense, I am because I think it's really important for us to try to understand why it's so challenging to make predictions, why it's so challenging to understand the complexities that are compounding on each other.

00:25:04.660 You know, I think about climate change models compounded with resource extraction, pollution, CO2, you know, there's so many things.

00:25:13.900 And like you were saying, we don't have thousands of years of data either, and things are changing so rapidly, and positive feedback loops feed into that. So there's so many angles in which to understand this. And yeah, it's really quite complex, and I'm appreciative that there's people like you that are focusing in and trying to make sense of this madness.

00:25:39.880 And I was also thinking, you know, I know a lot of our listeners will be familiar with

00:25:44.560 the finding that the world's average temperatures have gone up by one degree Fahrenheit in the

00:25:49.960 last 50 years, but they might be less familiar with findings that show that the coldest night

00:25:55.800 of winter has warmed by about seven degrees Fahrenheit.

00:25:59.420 And other studies project that winter's coldest temperatures will warm up to 13 degrees Fahrenheit

00:26:04.300 by 2050 to 2070.

00:26:06.680 what is the importance of these nuanced findings are there other incredibly you know powerful

00:26:13.880 findings like the above that seem to get lost in the conversation or are not conveyed to the

00:26:19.560 general public and what does the loss of cold winter nights mean in terms of being a part of

00:26:26.040 a range constraints for other forest insects yeah so and part part of why we wanted to do

00:26:32.940 this study is that we found that there is a bias towards considering the impacts of the warm side

00:26:40.920 of climate change. And, you know, there's no surprise about why that would be the case. We

00:26:45.280 were talking about the main term for what we now generally call climate change was global warming

00:26:50.460 up until recently. And that's still a popular way to refer to what's going on with this. But, you

00:26:55.100 know, as the climate warms, we lose winter. That's something that we need to pay attention to. Winter

00:27:01.080 is not just this dead season where nothing happens. Winter is an extremely important part

00:27:06.620 of the ecology in places where winter happens. And so, you know, this was one very immediate

00:27:12.260 impact that we could see of changing winter extreme temperatures in this pretty cold part

00:27:20.420 of the world. Another thing that tends to be concealed in discussions of global mean temperature

00:27:26.540 warming, you mentioned one degree Celsius. You know, what does that even mean? We don't consider

00:27:32.440 the weather ever in terms of the global average temperature. It's never reported on a weather

00:27:36.620 report. No one really knows the impact of what that means. You know, what's it like here when

00:27:42.560 the global temperature is one degree warmer, for instance? No one has a sense of that. And so

00:27:47.620 you have to parse out these really policy-oriented measures of warming into what they mean for

00:27:55.120 weather. And when you do that, one interesting thing that happens is that one degree of mean

00:28:00.360 warming does not mean one degree every single day at every moment across the whole year. It

00:28:06.540 is disproportionately falls on certain points in the temperature distribution. It affects winter

00:28:13.560 temperatures the most. And that's a bit of a mystery. And it's still being researched

00:28:17.940 intensively, there are local effects that could be responsible for this, like snow cover. Snow

00:28:25.980 cover is very white, and it reflects back solar radiation and keeps it from soaking into the

00:28:32.660 ground and coming back out at night. So that could be one thing that is changing that could

00:28:38.840 amplify warming as we start to melt a little bit of that snow. Another thing that could happen

00:28:44.800 is the circulational changes at the global scale.

00:28:48.540 People might remember that last winter was a very warm winter overall,

00:28:53.480 but had a couple of weeks of extreme cold in North America and Europe.

00:28:57.680 It was a very weird winter.

00:28:58.860 And part of that was because of these really anomalous circulations in the Arctic

00:29:04.640 with these lobes of very cold air breaking away.

00:29:08.180 And usually they would be strongly contained by very fast winds that circulate around the Arctic like a fence.

00:29:17.140 And some people say that this is an outcome of warming that's pretty well established in the physics.

00:29:22.640 But, you know, we're always limited by the lack of data we have and that a lot of our analysis and a lot of the way that we understand climate change in terms of the broader circulation of the atmosphere is through model experiments.

00:29:35.680 that we always have to ask

00:29:37.380 whether they're giving us the right answer

00:29:40.620 or if they are giving us the right answer,

00:29:42.600 they're giving it to us for the right reasons.

00:29:45.040 So the cold winter nights are important

00:29:48.180 for various other insects.

00:29:50.380 There is some connection

00:29:52.880 with another very prominent,

00:29:55.800 recent, actually invasive,

00:29:57.880 so not native to North America,

00:30:00.080 forest insect pest,

00:30:02.080 the emerald ash borer,

00:30:03.980 which is similarly invasive

00:30:05.680 chews into ash trees and kills them. And this was actually native to eastern Siberia

00:30:14.020 and northern China. So it's actually relatively adapted to cold climates and winters. And it

00:30:21.560 remains to be seen how warming winters would actually improve its ability to spread across

00:30:27.460 North America and pose a really continental threat to ash trees, which I really like ash

00:30:33.060 trees uh they're beautiful straight straight wood and they are very popular especially in montreal

00:30:39.000 where i'm from it's a popular urban horticultural tree that we plant all over the place so it'd be

00:30:45.080 really a shame to lose those but not just insects uh there are in northern climates most uh most

00:30:51.860 small mammals will spend the winter under the snowpack and they create a network of tunnels

00:30:56.600 and they go about their lives totally under the snow during the six months of the year that it's

00:31:01.960 frozen. The warming winters will certainly affect the dynamics and structure of that snow,

00:31:10.220 especially if you get a couple of really warm days that turn it to ice. It'll definitely

00:31:14.460 interact with the way that those mammals live under that snow during the winter.

00:31:19.020 And I mentioned one other example that comes to mind is apples. Apples need a winter chill in

00:31:25.240 order to flower, as far as I understand. And that's sensitive to a cold night or two during

00:31:33.200 the winter. That really gives them the chill that sets off the subsequent spring flowering that

00:31:40.100 brings us these apples. So there are connections to insects and insect forest disturbances. There

00:31:47.060 are connections to mammals. There are connections to the crops that we grow to eat. And there are

00:31:53.480 connections all over the place in the northern climates where winter has been shaping the

00:32:00.340 ecology and the agriculture for as long as people have been living there and as long as species have

00:32:06.740 been around. A second part to that question, or at least staying on the topic of temperatures,

00:32:14.900 I've read that annual minimum temperatures have played a large part in constraining beetle

00:32:19.700 populations. It was cold winter snaps that initially killed the beetles in their larval stage

00:32:25.440 and acted as a geographic threshold of sorts. Are there other cold limited forest insects for which

00:32:32.940 range constraints will no longer exist due to warming winters? Yeah, there are other ones for

00:32:39.640 sure. I believe the hemlock woody adelgid is another one, but I actually don't know that much

00:32:47.240 about it. I mean, one very interesting thing is the question of what will happen with southern

00:32:54.440 pine beetle's main predator, which is this beetle-eating wasp. And that is actually native

00:33:02.340 also, in addition to the south where southern pine beetle is from, but also feeded on different

00:33:10.060 species of beetles in the north in the United States. So it can survive cold temperatures to

00:33:15.800 some degree, and it'll just eat other things. So when the circumstances are different, the other

00:33:22.840 species of beetles and other species of trees are present. You know, this interaction between

00:33:28.960 this predator and its prey could be totally different. And that just completely remains

00:33:34.220 to be seen. It hasn't been researched yet. In doing research for this interview, I read that

00:33:40.340 Europe has a stronger chance of preventing the spread of tree-killing pests, similar to the

00:33:45.440 southern pine beetle because their forests tend to be more, you know, quote, actively managed and

00:33:51.000 fragmented. So in terms of adaptive strategies, land managers have practiced cutting out infested

00:33:57.680 trees as well as thinning. But I'm really actually weary of the discussion around adaptive strategies

00:34:03.520 as it seems to curtail the conversation we should be having, you know, a serious critique and

00:34:10.760 retribution of the norms and values that got us here in the first place.

00:34:15.400 So I'd like to ask you if you think these adaptive strategies will work under such serious

00:34:20.580 predictions. And also more broadly, how do you feel about the techno fixes and adaptation

00:34:26.860 strategies that are continuously brought forth following scientific reports that

00:34:31.480 outline the reality of what we're facing? Misguided, missing the point, and unlikely to

00:34:37.340 succeed. The Southern Pine Beetle paper picked up some media attention when it came out in the

00:34:43.700 Northeast. And so I did maybe a dozen media interviews on it. And I tried to make a very

00:34:51.420 strong point when every interviewer brought up what kinds of adaptive strategies forest managers

00:34:58.180 were considering to prevent the spread. I really tried to emphasize that, well, you know, we caused

00:35:04.140 this problem. And this is a part of the world where we have caused the brunt of the problem,

00:35:08.520 because this is a very wealthy, high-consuming part of the world that has been burning fossil

00:35:13.920 fuels throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond. So, I mean, really, we have made a choice

00:35:22.240 to live this lifestyle that causes these slew of problems, one of which is greenhouse gas

00:35:29.880 emissions that cause climate change. And now we have in our backyard, the impacts and, you know,

00:35:35.860 compared to sea level rise and low lying coastal areas in countries that don't have the most

00:35:41.560 resources to relocate or bolster those coastal environments, you could say that this is not

00:35:47.440 the most life threatening, or livelihood altering impact. So there's a there's a disconnect between

00:35:54.720 the severity of the impact and who causes this problem. And, you know, so from an equity

00:35:59.500 perspective, and also from the perspective of really going to the root cause of what's of this

00:36:04.940 problem, we need to talk immediately about what actually causes it. And I remain convinced, you

00:36:12.380 can make arguments about this just being a problem of the of the system itself, and the dynamics of

00:36:20.060 investment and the infrastructure, the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure, and that there's

00:36:26.700 this inertial phase where individual will can't really do anything. But ultimately, I really think

00:36:32.660 that the fossil fuel emissions are driven by people who use goods and have large houses and

00:36:39.980 drive cars and things like that. And only one of maybe 12 interviews that I did actually reported

00:36:47.480 that I said this, and that was Vice Motherboard. So hats off to Vice Motherboard for actually,

00:36:54.180 interestingly, Vice's relatively youthful news outlet. So maybe it's just a generational thing

00:36:59.560 that we are more preoccupied with the root cause because we know as young people that

00:37:06.120 the problem will persist as long as we continue to cause the problem. So yeah, you can tinker

00:37:13.300 with the forests, you can cut buffer zones all you want, but there's just going to be something

00:37:17.860 else that's going to interfere with the system. And as we've been discussing, it's really hard

00:37:23.220 to foresee what those impacts are going to be. And I can really imagine that our technical

00:37:27.780 adaptations will have consequences that will spiral into the general chaos and complexity

00:37:35.560 of these systems. And so really, why not just avoid the problem? We can do this if we put our

00:37:41.920 minds to it. And we're really responsible personally at the level of our consumption

00:37:46.180 and in how we vote and in how we get out on the streets. That's really what it all comes down to,

00:37:52.100 I think. Yeah, I really couldn't agree more. I think, of course, we can talk about buffer zones

00:37:59.040 and thinning, but if we're not actually going to look at what created the issue in the first place,

00:38:05.260 we're just, I actually think Derek Jensen said this quote during our interview years ago, but

00:38:11.780 he had made this metaphor of somebody coming in like a stabbed victim coming into an emergency

00:38:17.920 room and the doctors are trying to sew up his wounds but then there's somebody still stabbing

00:38:22.840 him and so you know we can try to do these restoration techniques which I think and and

00:38:29.360 not that I'm actually that into the the thinning restoration techniques I think there's a lot of

00:38:34.360 issues there and I think it's mostly actually about money and getting more timber for the

00:38:39.620 logging industry but I do feel like yes yes we should be doing restoration measures but we do

00:38:47.860 need to be looking at the root cause and I do think the millennial and younger generation we 0.78

00:38:52.800 are inheriting such a complexly you know we're inheriting this very oof I have a lot of words

00:39:01.900 in my mind but an earth that is really in trouble and we have to be thinking about things differently

00:39:07.360 and I know I also was thinking about what you were saying about consumption I think it's so

00:39:12.320 interesting to see our human minds jump to these thoughts of oh we can we can you know do this

00:39:20.020 techno fix we can do that we can do that we can blame these people we can blame those people it's

00:39:25.320 their fault it's their fault it's their fault but we never actually just want to turn it around on

00:39:28.780 ourselves because it's really challenging to do so and say oh wow am I still consuming am I still

00:39:35.600 buying that plastic case of pineapple when i live in new york city in the winter or whatever time

00:39:42.080 am i still pumping exxon mobile fuel in my car shell bp doesn't matter and i know for me i even

00:39:49.920 think to myself a lot gosh it feels actually crazy to be conscious in my body embodying two very

00:39:57.640 different kind of like a jekyll and hyde of like this one person who really wants to

00:40:02.640 have integrity and just be in reciprocity with the earth and then this other part of me this

00:40:09.300 modern person who has a computer and a microphone and an iphone and you know has a car and all of

00:40:14.740 these things it's it's really challenging and i don't i don't think it's a reason to be debilitated

00:40:19.360 although i know i even go through my own bouts with that but just to all kind of sit in the

00:40:25.340 dichotomy together and go okay this is what it is and how do we move forward from this place rather

00:40:30.440 than trying to find false solutions or trying to blame other people when we know that in

00:40:36.380 some way we're all complicit in the system.

00:40:38.560 And yes, it is a systemic issue, but we also all uphold that system.

00:40:44.000 And so how do we get out of it?

00:40:46.120 And I don't have the answers, but it's a question that I ask all the time of guests,

00:40:51.140 of myself, of the forest.

00:40:54.320 So I'm really happy that you went there with it.

00:40:57.000 Hats off to Derek Jensen for for always having the appropriately urgent and visual metaphor on hand. You mentioned that the earth is in trouble. And I want to talk about that because I'm in a department that deals with long timescales. There are geologists, there are paleoclimatologists and paleoecologists. And, and, you know, I don't think the earth is in trouble, actually. I think the earth is fine. Our place is in it is in trouble.

00:41:25.440 and people are of this earth you know we are through and through and through of the earth

00:41:31.660 we come from here and it's really a question of whether we want to we wanted to continue to have

00:41:36.740 a reasonable kind of existence and on this planet and to be embedded in it uh in a way that that is

00:41:43.880 conducive to our existence if we uh make this place unhospitable to us the the planet will

00:41:50.700 rebound uh the planet this this will be a blip uh we've changed it a lot but but lots of things

00:41:56.720 have changed the planet a lot and a lot of things that have changed the planet a lot in the billions

00:42:01.320 of years of earth history have not been around they didn't continue to succeed so it's a question

00:42:06.700 of whether we want to have a successful life and and so i really want to emphasize that this is

00:42:11.140 this is not a purely benevolent thing i think when you see this correctly you see that there's

00:42:16.280 you're not doing a service to the planet there's there's no difference between doing a service to

00:42:20.600 to ourselves as humans and doing a service to the broader community of species that we're part of.

00:42:26.240 But really, at the end of the day, we're the ones who are going to go. Everything else is going to

00:42:31.120 shift a bit, but it'll come back and be vibrant once again. And you also talked about this

00:42:36.100 difference between seeking a better harmony and a more contemplated life, and then this tension

00:42:42.240 with modernity. Well, you know, I don't think the consumption is fundamentally human. I think there

00:42:47.460 are lots of expressions of human culture and history that were not consumptive and actually

00:42:53.440 had antagonistic ideas towards consumption. And, you know, I think we can learn a lot from

00:42:58.860 the diversity of human culture and human conceptualization of life in the world.

00:43:05.080 Yeah, I appreciate that clarification of the human mind. I guess what I

00:43:08.540 meant to say is this modern capitalist consumer addicted we to go mind and yeah and i i gosh in

00:43:19.780 terms of like is the earth going to be okay it's a topic that i've gotten into a lot and think about

00:43:25.700 um you know deep time geological time like you had mentioned and sure you know the earth wasn't

00:43:34.060 the same a billion years ago the dinosaurs went extinct yeah we can look and see that there has

00:43:39.040 been this is the sixth mass extinct extinction so of course we do know on some level that

00:43:44.660 this in a sense something similar maybe has happened before it's hard though for me to say

00:43:52.960 the earth will be okay even though i said the earth isn't okay and i know i can i can see the

00:43:59.220 juxtaposition in that and i i don't know it's kind of like that same tone when i hear people

00:44:05.560 who talk about wildlife conservation and they go oh no no like the population is healthy it's like

00:44:12.480 the population is healthy to who like who is the population healthy to when there used to be

00:44:17.540 billions of salmon and now a healthy population could be deemed a couple thousand it's like well

00:44:23.840 how is that healthy for like is are you asking the salmon that are the salmon saying that there's

00:44:28.500 enough of them you know there's like this there's this uh human supremacist animistic mind that i

00:44:35.460 kind of go in between and not that i can speak for these creatures but i do feel like

00:44:41.860 just the whole mindset of what we do think is okay and not okay and what we think is healthy

00:44:48.340 not healthy what we think is enough nature enough wilderness to sustain what are we trying to even

00:44:54.720 do we even want to sustain civilization i mean i know i'm going down a rabbit hole here but it kind

00:44:59.820 of just it just took me there this mini conversation within the pine beetle conversation

00:45:05.000 you know i i don't know i just i i sit with the challenge of that thought of will the earth be

00:45:10.100 okay whatever okay is and losing so much biodiversity doesn't feel okay to me you know

00:45:18.300 watching the glaciers melt rapidly watching the salmon collapse watching grizzly bears collapse

00:45:26.040 watching you know i could go on and on and on and we both could there's something it's almost like

00:45:30.900 it's not so much it will the earth be okay it's almost this question of why is it not okay that

00:45:38.900 this is how it's going down or something like that and i know this is kind of this unanswerable

00:45:43.180 this unanswerable conversation that we really can't get to the bottom of but it's definitely

00:45:49.480 piqued a lot of passion in me just thinking about this chain of thought i i think it is answerable

00:45:56.860 really and the the task for for our generation and for our children and our children's children

00:46:02.860 is to to western our culture and uh to think about what we want our lives to be i think we've

00:46:09.240 been led down a dead end uh in this conceptualization of life this understanding and we need to we need

00:46:16.320 to change that and we can change that and we've changed attitudes before you know we as i said

00:46:21.060 diversity of human expressions um and you know the really sad thing is we are we are a peculiar

00:46:28.200 species people uh we are not just like any other species uh we are very dexterous and very very

00:46:35.180 smart and very, very social in very, very complex ways. And we think about ourselves in very,

00:46:41.840 very complex and deep ways. And it's just kind of sad and dumb. We can do better than this. 0.99

00:46:49.580 And I think that's really the challenge. That's where we are, is to not let the human legacy and

00:46:56.520 what it means for this planet to have had a species like us up until this point, to let that

00:47:01.180 just be such an utter and sad failure that we got into this, you know, this little pit

00:47:08.820 that we couldn't get ourselves out of because we just couldn't imagine a life that was reasonable.

00:47:31.180 And there he was when he remembers I am

00:47:40.720 Oh, the wicked carried us away

00:47:45.480 Captivity he required from us a song

00:47:50.980 How can we save the other song in a strange land

00:48:00.280 While the wicked carried us away

00:48:06.160 Captivity required for my saison

00:48:11.980 How can we sing beyond a song in the stream

00:48:19.180 Singing a song of freedom

00:48:27.640 Sing a song of freedom, sing a song

00:48:34.000 One more time

00:48:41.360 We've got to talk about it

00:48:47.080 Everyone

00:48:57.640 This other thought, I know prior to this interview, you had mentioned an interest in

00:49:04.740 thinking about the cultural and social side of the climate problem as someone who is from

00:49:10.300 the scientific trenches. And in response to this, I'm curious about what you think

00:49:15.380 are the limitations for scientific research, or what does all of this research mean for how we

00:49:22.280 can live and structure our social and economic lives? Well, I think science plays a relatively

00:49:28.040 minor role. You know, on one hand, science is one way that we understand the world. It's a way of

00:49:36.200 taking all of the data that's available to us. And data is just kind of whatever we can perceive

00:49:43.000 ourselves as humans or through our tools to try to make sense of it. But it's a very ideological

00:49:50.480 and a very simple way of understanding things.

00:49:53.240 You can only really analyze what you can neatly quantify.

00:49:57.260 And that kind of runs into the boundaries

00:49:59.640 of what science can really talk about

00:50:01.880 and what science is willing to talk about

00:50:03.800 within the culture of science.

00:50:06.360 So I struggle with this

00:50:07.780 because I spend my time training as a scientist.

00:50:10.540 But I think we know what we need to know about,

00:50:13.860 especially on the mitigation and emissions side of things,

00:50:17.220 about what climate change really entails.

00:50:20.300 So then I am left to think about, you know, what really is the role of science and what is the utility of the work I do?

00:50:26.060 And this is part of the reason I work on adaptation questions, mostly questions of how we can prepare for and anticipate the impact,

00:50:33.680 because, you know, working on simply forecasting impacts or accounting for the economic and technical drivers of emissions

00:50:44.100 always kind of leads you into the frustration of the political impasse that we're in right now,

00:50:51.540 in terms of having the basis of power, the locus of power being in state governments

00:50:57.420 that are relatively inert and ineffectual on this problem. So yeah, I think there's a role for

00:51:07.040 science, but I think scientists are a bit frustrated if they realize the limitations

00:51:11.900 of their field, or they're a little bit, you know, too ideological about what science can do for us.

00:51:17.600 I mean, we have to keep in mind that science is part of the social concept of life that really

00:51:24.860 bolsters the attitudes of continuous material progress and technical advancement that has

00:51:30.940 caused this problem. And I think we need to be very, very critical about the mythology surrounding

00:51:36.460 science and progress when science meets this problem and this field of specialization.

00:51:45.120 This may sound, Kurt, what I'm about to say, but do you really see scientific research around

00:51:50.340 climate change and extreme weather events as a motivating factor for change? It just seems like

00:51:57.500 when things are so obvious, the dominant society and the scientific field itself suffers from such

00:52:02.900 a limited view of nature because we have imbued values like profit and war and domination onto

00:52:09.980 the natural world. Do you think that this research is really going to shift people?

00:52:16.880 I think it does inform our understanding of the world. And, you know, one field that I really

00:52:22.640 admire is ecology, because I think ecology is a relatively young discipline, and it's made an

00:52:29.040 effort to be non-ideological about what it says about nature to some degree. And it also attracts

00:52:35.500 people who are very open-minded towards the broader meaning of ecology as a science and

00:52:41.200 the system that it's trying to understand, if you can even call it a system. And one way that

00:52:46.080 this is the case is that from pretty early on in ecology's history, it tried to dismiss the

00:52:52.460 misconception of evolution as some kind of arrow into the future of species where everything leads

00:52:58.220 to us basically and to think of things more as this distributed web of really you know complicated

00:53:04.420 gene exchange and you know relative fitness and population dynamics and then when it comes to

00:53:09.560 people social dynamics or even some other species have a social interaction with their own evolution

00:53:15.520 and so I think that has informed an understanding of the world that is closer to the reality which

00:53:21.600 is that everything is linked and systems are just kind of participants in nature are all

00:53:29.560 just kind of in this bath of interaction and so this atomizing worldview where things are broken

00:53:38.000 down and reduced has been challenged a little bit from within science itself which is kind of the

00:53:42.500 original cultural proponent of that way of thinking about things that leads you into seeing

00:53:47.660 write off zones of the world as a legitimate way to consider nature. And then I really agree with

00:53:54.860 you that the alarmism and climate impacts research is a bit of a predicament. For one thing, I think

00:54:01.920 this is paralyzing to a lot of people. A lot of people are just kind of hopeless about what is

00:54:08.680 happening here. And I don't necessarily think that's a reason not to do this research. I think

00:54:14.840 we need to be careful about how we interpret the meaning of the research, which is, number one,

00:54:19.500 we, to some degree, climate changes has already happened and will continue to happen based on

00:54:24.040 where we are in time right now. And going into the future, I don't see technically much cause

00:54:30.980 for hope to think that there won't be at least two degrees of climate warming by, say, 2100.

00:54:38.640 And so we need to know what the impacts are going to be. And people are very adaptable,

00:54:42.120 and we can do that. But also we need to see these looming, alarming kinds of risks as things that

00:54:49.880 motivate us to do this change. And I think it's up to us to not be paralyzed by this. I think it's

00:54:57.220 up to us to be, especially people who are in the high consuming parts of the world that are really

00:55:01.480 responsible for this, to not be paralyzed and to say we need to do the work that's really ours to

00:55:08.400 do to move through this but yeah i can definitely see uh how seeing paper after paper come out high

00:55:14.580 profile articles about how everything is uh total catastrophe is is really motivating and you can

00:55:21.000 definitely ask that question and a lot of people struggle with it yeah yeah it's i've seen science

00:55:30.460 work in a sense to change things like it's really interesting but a lot of government agencies are

00:55:36.660 funding they need to see the science before they can actually either give money or put on stricter

00:55:43.860 regulations and it's kind of frustrating to see in terms of species collapse and then let's say

00:55:51.480 their tribal members or community members or scientists having to do all of this work for

00:55:55.920 years just to prove that tailings ponds that are spilling into the river are affecting salmon

00:56:02.400 populations or something like that obviously salmon is um one of my my dearest kin so i

00:56:08.320 always think about them but yeah it's i do see science making a difference in a lot of ways and

00:56:15.080 i also see people just being inundated and saturated like the general public for instance

00:56:19.460 saturated with information whether it's misinformation which there's a ton of that

00:56:24.140 and has been for years or more honest information but nonetheless i think people are still like well

00:56:30.000 what do we do? Okay, the climate's warming or destabilizing, but how do I even take that into

00:56:39.720 my daily life? How do I even work with that information? How do I embody that information?

00:56:45.160 And I think that's been a huge challenge for myself and I know so many others. How do we take

00:56:50.280 what we're learning and actually do something about it that's tangible and effective? And

00:56:58.000 yeah so that's definitely maybe for our next conversation we can go even further into that

00:57:04.160 topic but this has been really wonderful cory um thank you so much and i really appreciate

00:57:09.780 the breadth of your thought process not just around these pine forests and die-offs from

00:57:16.300 beetles but also just this wider expansive view on science and culture and humanity it's been a

00:57:23.000 really wonderful conversation. Thanks for inviting me, and thanks for listening to me.

00:57:28.000 thanks for listening to for the wild podcast I'm audio producer Andrew Storrs

00:57:54.780 The music in today's show was by Little Wings, and our theme music is by Kate Wolf.

00:58:00.440 I'd like to thank our host and founder, Ayanna Young, writing and research for this episode

00:58:05.600 by Madison Magalski, outreach and research, Francesca Glassbell, Aidan McCray, and Hannah

00:58:12.900 Wilton, podcast music, Carter Lou McElroy, digital community organizing, Suzanne Daliwal

00:58:20.140 and Aaron Wise, graphic and web design Erica Ekrem, and Melanie Younger with Partnerships

00:58:26.620 and Media.

For The Wild - September 11, 2019

COREY LESK on Warming Winters and Southern Pine Beetle Migration ⧸136

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