The looming environmental crises before us can evoke fear. Fear is a powerful emotion that, if not addressed positively, can lead to unproductive behavior or, worse, no action at all. Hope is the antidote to fear, but hope requires action or else it fades away. Science—especially the earth, biological, chemical, climate, and environmental sciences—provides us with tools to understand the complexity of our environment and illuminates pathways for us to act to improve our environmental outcomes.
The biodiversity crisis, characterized by the historical loss of species and the likely increase in extinction rates, is driven by habitat loss, climate change, and pollution. In the last 20 years, science has shown us that fully functioning ecosystems capture and sequester more carbon than compromised environments. They are also more resilient to the impacts of climate change – heat waves, droughts, and more frequent, damaging precipitation events. Restoring fully functioning ecosystems is critical for positive outcomes, and the presence and health of keystone species are essential for such restoration.
Keystones species are those that many other species rely on. They include apex predators and other smaller species (plants, insects, fungus, birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and fish), and they play a critical role in maintaining ecological balance. We typically think of wolves in this role: Wolves keep elk moving and prevent them from overbrowsing stream banks, which allows willows to grow and beavers to build dams, so the trout have enough water in streams in dry summers to survive. The list of connections to the presence of the wolf goes on. And other smaller species, such as prairie dogs, can be keystone species: Their networks of burrows host snakes and burrowing owls, their mowing around their colonies increases plant diversity, which in turn supports insect health and diversity.
Scientific research has highlighted the subtle yet profound relationships between species within healthy ecosystems and underscored the need for conservation efforts to encompass sufficiently large areas to support keystone species. In the case of large predators like grizzly bears and herbivores such as bison, adequate space is essential to support large enough populations to harbor the genetic diversity within population that is necessary for the long-term viability of that species.
With this swell of scientific understanding, the concept and practice of rewilding has gained more momentum worldwide. Here in the United States, two massive efforts come to my mind: The American Prairie’s effort to establish a 3.2 million-acre, contiguous grassland preserve in northeastern Montana. By comparison, this is an area the size of three Yellowstone National Parks, and Connecticut is 3.5 million acres in size. Another outstanding effort is the removal of four mainstem dams on California’s and Oregon’s Klamath River, to restore what was once the third largest run of salmon in the U.S. The returning numbers of salmon are now so low that the Yurok tribe, which has treaty fishing rights at the mouth of the river, has canceled the salmon fishing season for 7 of the past 8 years.
Both of these projects hope to restore wildlife to levels not seen by living generations. That is a big vision, because each subsequent generation remembers the bounty of wildlife from their own youth as a baseline—not the bounty of wildlife from their grandfather or great-great-grandfather’s youth. Restoration efforts typically focus on this diminishing baseline found in living memory. Shifting Baseline Syndrome, a term coined by fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly, described this problem with reducing fish stocks, and how it could inhibit actions to manage meaningful restorations. If you are trying to restore populations of a species back to what was 2% of the historical population, you are kind of missing the mark.
Closer to home and on a much smaller scale, MxLT is focused on doing our small part to restore habitat for the keystone species of mature forest trees and diadromous fish. But you say, “What?! Connecticut is already covered with trees, about 60% is covered by tree cover. Aren’t trees already restored here?” Yes, we do have trees and we do have forests, but they lack significantly in age and continuity. Who among us can find a forest of a couple of hundred acres of 300+ year old trees within an hour drive? A mature, 500-acre forest block would represent a mere 0.014% of Connecticut or 0.18% of the land area of Middlesex County. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask to have several protected, fully mature forest blocks scattered around Connecticut, given the value it would return.
You may be thinking that our State Forests cover several thousands of forested acres each. A forest on a 1% per year harvest plan yields a forest with an average age of 50 years. You also need several generations of trees reaching maturity (75+ years) and then falling to create openings for younger trees to create the good mix of tree ages. You need several generations of undisturbed trees to start the self-selection of genetics that will thrive the best in mature conditions. The forest floor needs big, downed trunks of dead trees to create structure and microenvironments. It needs deep organic soils developed over centuries, where the mycelium has been nurtured under a thick layer of duff, protected by a towering canopy that creates an envelope of less extreme temperatures and higher humidity. While there is nothing wrong with a forest managed for wood products, you can’t create a fully functioning forest by timbering it. Creating a true, mature forest takes time, and a lot of it. What we can do is provide protection for a forest while it finds its way. To be able to see what we don’t know now changes our perspective on our responsibility.
Diadromous fish species, which spend part of their life cycle in the ocean and part of their life cycle in fresh water, must be able to swim past more than the 4,000 legacy dams here in Connecticut – dams that have blocked their passage for the last 50 to 350 years. They need to spread through the cold streams that network through our state like tree branches, carrying into our forests, marine-derived nutrients to nourish our impoverished, New England glaciated soils. They need good forests to keep the streams shaded and cool, and forested buffers to filter out pollution before rainwater gathers into streams and rivers.
Not all diadromous species are endearing to the public, but an adult sea lamprey returning to spawn may become the meal for a Bald Eagle chick, which is a creature endearing to the public. If the lamprey does make it into a cool stream to spawn, the decomposing carcass of a spawned adult sea lamprey in early summer provides well timed nutrients for semi-aquatic insects, which in turn will feed neotropical birds that migrated here so they could feed their young on plentiful insects. It is a beautiful tapestry that we have only glimpsed in patches because our ecosystems are substantially compromised. We need to make those patches bigger and more species diverse.
The Middlesex Land Trust and our partners: land trusts, government agencies and our communities, are making progress, continuing to let nature heal itself. Let’s keep the wildlife and the wildness that we cherish, make it better, and sustain Hope with this Action, knowing we can and will make a difference.
From the Land,
Stuart