Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
Five years after the Silver Fire in the Black Range in southern New Mexico, Gambel Oak is replacing pines in the burn scar. The Southwest has been losing its coniferous forests for decades.
COMMENTARY: I remember watching a dramatic video about climate change in elementary school that predicted the Southwest might someday become an uninhabitable wasteland.
I began pondering the real possibility that New Mexico would lose its coniferous forests in 2014. I was working on an article about what the future might hold, with a focus on the Silver Fire that torched 139,000 acres of pines in the Black Range near Kingston a year earlier.
Heath Haussamen
Craig Allen, a U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist, pointed me to a study he helped author that found a transformation was already happening: The Southwest lost up to 18 percent of its coniferous forests to wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks between 1984 and 2006.
Allen told me mountains across the Southwest might someday look like southern New Mexico’s Organ Mountains, a range characterized by jagged peaks, thorny bushes and cacti, not coniferous forests. Human-caused overgrowth in our forests, drought and the planet’s warming climate are to blame.
The Black Range, where Gambel Oak is replacing pines in the burn scar, “could look like the Organs by the middle of the century,” Allen said.
I was alarmed then. And four years later, widespread belief in the scientific community has only become more urgent.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an ominous warning to humanity on Monday. As reported by The New York Times, the report “paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented precedent.’”
Ninety-one scientists analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies in writing the new report. It describes a frightening world just 22 years into the future if we don’t act now: worsening food shortages and poverty, more extreme drought and wildfires, the loss of the planet’s coral reefs.
We have to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We must replace coal with renewable energy sources. We need to transform our economic systems.
The Trump administration is doing the opposite. It “assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed,” the Washington Post recently reported. The administration expects the planet to warm seven degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century – and is proposing freezing fuel efficiency standards intended to help reduce emissions.
Because, what’s the point? So we might as well make some more money now.
After refusing to take serious action to address climate change for decades, some days it does feel like our fate may be sealed. In New Mexico, our reservoirs barely got us through the year. The Animas River in the Four Corners region hit an all-time low this fall. We’re pumping groundwater at an unsustainable rate. A battle before the U.S. Supreme Court over southern New Mexico’s groundwater and the Rio Grande looms.
As I stood on top of a hill in the Black Range in 2014 and took a panoramic photo of the devastation around me, I thought about the video I watched in elementary school. I pondered the world I’m handing to my daughter.
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The panoramic photo I took in 2014.
On that hill, some tiny plants were the only green in the otherwise post-apocalyptic scene: A dusty and dead landscape covered with black and grey trunks pointing at the sky.
We’ve already altered the planet. But these scientists say there’s still a window, even if one that’s rapidly closing, to act.
Those of us who are living in this moment have to decide how radically the planet transforms. The future is at stake.
Heath Haussamen is NMPolitics.net’s editor and publisher. Agree with his opinion? Disagree? NMPolitics.net welcomes your views. Learn about submitting your own commentary here.