Catch Up #9 - Halfway There -
How can it be 2025 already? How quickly the first five years of this project have passed. At the same time, given all that has happened, it can feel like time passes slowly. Before carrying on into the decade’s second half, it feels appropriate to briefly take stock of key lessons learned from the first half. With this project being framed by exploring and answering three, central questions, it is logical to structure this summary around them.
How Are the Forests Changing? As shared in earlier entries, the answer varies significantly between the three forests. In two of the forests, we experience relatively little apparent change beyond the basic baseline of forests rebuilding ecological complexity and resilience, when given the chance. In contrast, Mt. Richmond Forest is experiencing several forms of rapid, significant and, in some case, unexpected change. These include areas of tree die off, shifting hydrologic patterns, the arrival of a new, invasive, exotic plant and the imminent arrival of Emerald ash borer. Though further analysis of our biodiversity monitoring data is needed, we sense that the forests’ ecosystems are being impacted by larger, regional trends in declining biodiversity. A countervailing force is the ways that our stewardship approaches continue to lead to restoration in forests that become older, more complex, resilient and habitat-rich with each passing year. Inevitably, we ask ourselves “what factors are driving the changes we are experiencing?”. Though assigning attribution is tricky business calling for care, it appears that the changes we continue to track align with the various forms of global change stressors that scientific modelling indicates are happening and will continue to happen and accelerate. These include more extreme weather (temperature, winds, precipitation...), creating more stress. This brings with it increased vulnerability to other stresses including damage from insects and disease.
How Are the Changes Influencing us as Forest Stewards and our Relationships with the Forests? The rapid and significant changes logically motivate and force us to both pay closer attention and figure out how best to respond to the changes and their ecological impacts. This includes acknowledging our increased sense of vulnerability and uncertainty. Responsible stewardship demands more attention, work, knowledge, skill, cooperation and humility than it did in the past. We take much less for granted and have a heightened sense of gratitude.
Are we, as a Species, Rising to the Challenge of Acknowledging and Fixing the Problems That we’ve Created? On the one hand, it is easy to find and celebrate examples of encouraging leadership and innovative initiative that are making positive differences across geographies and scales. On the other hand, the worsening of the problems continues to outpace our ability – and/or willingness – to address them. Based on such indicators as declining biodiversity, increasing greenhouse gases and fossil fuel consumption, as well as social inequities, we are not on track to make the changes needed to avoid worsening problems. Is this a matter of lacking the will or the ability to? Clearly our species is challenged to act in ways that we’ve never done before. It seems impossible to parse apart will from ability. The question of what the next five years will bring remains a fascinating and suspenseful story. And then...... ?
