“It’s hard not to feel…well, it has felt like failure there,” says Allen, who recently retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, and has monitored landscape change in these mountains since he was a Ph.D. student in the late 1970s. “We saw the vulnerability. But we could not act substantively enough, quickly enough to deal with it.”
Across the Earth, people are watching the impacts of climate change play out across their homelands, the places they depend upon and love. From rising seas lapping at the shores and inundating coasts to the highest mountains, where snowpacks are dwindling and glaciers receding, we are reeling from how these changes affect every aspect of our lives. In all of this, there is room for grief. These changes are dangerous and disorienting. But building new relationships with the landscapes around us will allow us to survive and give the other species we still share this planet with the chance to thrive.
The Good News About Climate Change: There’s Still Hope
With warming environments, landscapes are shifting. But life is still abundant.
When ecologist Craig Allen looks across the brown, grassy shrublands on the east flank of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico, he feels no satisfaction that he was right.
Right that the world was warming. Right that warming would spur such large, severe fires that the forest he studied for decades would disappear. And right that increasing temperatures here and across the globe have made it too warm for conifer trees to regain even a toehold across many of their old landscapes.
Analysis
Analysis Based on factual reporting, although it incorporates the expertise of the author/producer and may offer interpretations and conclusions.
Life Is Abundant, Even as the Climate Is Changing
The East fork of the Jemez River flows through the Jemez Mountains of Santa Fe National Forest in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Photo by Ron Reznik / VW Pics/ Universal Images Group / Getty Images
Climate change is dangerous and disorienting. But building new relationships with the landscapes around us will allow us to survive and give the other species we still share this planet with the chance to thrive.
Apr 22, 2021
When ecologist Craig Allen looks across the brown, grassy shrub lands on the east flank of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico, he feels no satisfaction that he was right.